There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Leave Dad alone" I told Aislinn. "His Britishness is sort-circuiting.

Everyday US Marines make possible the impossible and then go about their business like it's just the way things are supposed to be.

I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don't know what you'd call it. A socktagon?

I've fallen for you like a blind roofer.

There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books

I love fried okra. The fact that it's okra makes me feel like it's good for you - I forget the fact that it's fried.

The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

Greatness starts with the replacement of hatred with polite disdain.

The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.

God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed.