The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much unintermit-tent gloom.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Nothing fails like failure

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

You know, it is a little known fact that thinking is entirely overrated. The world would be a much better place if we all did a lot less of it.

She considered what had made Denmark home to her anyway. Was it the sense of familiarity? That wherever she went there were echoes of a hundred memories she could pluck from her thoughts?

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

I'm a bit of a romantic, to a fault. It's led me to some great things and also some sad things. It's made me a better person, to keep a good spirit about dating.

To me, thought-controlled computing is as simple and powerful as a paintbrush - one more tool to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds within us.

I had such a big mouth for so long that it doesn't faze anybody anymore.

Don't go on American Idol, I think you'll spend the rest of your life living it down and I think it's getting kinda scary, isn't it?

I think dancing is an emotional experience.

I don't feel 70. I am still looking out from 14-year-old eyes.

The question is not, "Do you know you are a sinner?" the question is this, "As you have heard me preach the Gospel, has God so worked in your life that the sin you once loved you now hate?"