The duality of St Petersburg and Leningrad remains. They are not even on speaking terms.

A violin should be played with love, or not at all.

We should learn from children not to hold grudges. Children often fight when they play together but they quickly make up and their fights don't deteriorate into bitter feuds.

Maximum your strengths.

A golden spoon is useless when the soup bowl is empty.

Lament invoked love.Woe invoked wonder.Grief invoked grace.Cry invoked celebration.(Page 80)

...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

In the beginning Man created God; and in the image of Man created he him. And Man gave unto God a multitude of names, that he might be Lord over the earth when it was suited to man.

Punk is like looking at a mirror. I already have a mirror so I don't need the Offspring to remind me how gorgeous I am.

Iloved Ashley Hope Perez's heartbreaking Out of Darkness set in late the 1930s in a small town Texas. It should win all the YA awards.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

Truth (satya) is positive, nonviolence is negative.