We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

The older the friendship, the stronger the trust.

This is a wonderful joke to play upon a prisoner, to promise forgiveness.

If I had the knackI'd sing likeCherry flakes falling

I'm a version of the same person.

I can recollect nothing more to say at present; perhaps breakfast may assist my ideas. I was deceived -- my breakfast supplied only two ideas -- that the rolls were good and the butter bad.

Whatever you know in your heart, live at the expense of anything else.

Fame and success put tremendous demands on people. It robs them of their necessary privacy and anonymity. That's hard for even healthy people to deal with.

The troblemakers in Hungary are the Jews... they demoralize our country and they are the leaders of the revolutionary gang that is torturing Hungary.

I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

When you're old, you are more certain of who you are, and that may be a good thing or a bad thing.