They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

To want is to have a weakness.

Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.

Your true power is not in your difference, but in your consistency of being different. The world will always adjust to consistency, yet struggle with change.

I'm patient.

I just like being as romantic as possible. I thrive off unrequited love. I've been in love in one way or another since I was 14. I go full-on in and get obsessive.

We Virginians do not go to the storied shrines of the past to do worship but rather to gain inspiration.

Man thinks, and at once becomes the master of the beings that do not think.

A whipper-snapper of criticism who quoted dead languages to hide his ignorance of life.

To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.

Truth is not afraid of questions.

Uganda can greatly benefit from American evangelicals if they separate the Scott Lively extremists from the Rick Warren-type of moderate evangelicals.