That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

Life's generally artless ... but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you're in the final act of a lousy movie.

Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void.

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

Coffee justifies the existence of the word 'aroma'.

There is no God and that's His only commandment.

With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.

You think God will never forgive you, but the only God is beauty and beauty always forgives. It forgives with its infinite indifference.

The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

Change begins with you. It only takes a moment to make a difference in the lives of others.

Some of us think we already know the answer. They are the people who close a book and never think about it again. To them, the story ends at the words 'The End' and that's that.

It seems that we learn lessons when we least expect them but always when we need them the most and the true "gift" in these lessons always lies in the learning process itself.

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

I really have to wonder who or what made Daddy become this way. Babies aren't born cruel or filled with sick desire. Evil is not intrinsic. It's fashioned.

The white spruce forest along the banks is most inspiring, magnificent here. Down the terraced slopes and right to the water's edge on the alluvial soil it stands in ranks.

My position has always been, along with many other people, that any differences be resolved in a nonviolent way.

I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I'm not Russian.

[A]s if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand.

I always overpay or overtip when I'm upset.