The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

There are only three things which increase when shared: love, wisdom and happiness.

As a rule of thumb, it was always safer if the Commander-in-Chief formulated a risky plan.

Love is the essence, fragrance, and beauty of life.

Being poor is a state of mind, not a condition.

Once you run and once you win with an unabashed progressive feminist standard, then it becomes easier for everybody else who's running.

Getting even has never healed a single person.

Faith reinvigorates the will, enriches the affections, and awakens a sense of creativeness. Active faith knows no fear, and it is a safeguard to me against cynicism and despair.

I was involved as deputy mayor in New York City on 9/11.

Sentiment is the mightiest force in civilization; not sentimentality, but sentiment. Women will bring this into politics. Home, sweet home, is as powerful on the hustings as at the fireside.

There is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want more income and strive for it. Yet as Western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier.