What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

Exile might satisfy the anger of the living, but it did not appease the dead.

Nostalgia: How long's that been around?

My God, help me always resolutely to strive, and, through life and death, to force my way unto Thee.

The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

So for a good old-gentlemanly vice, I think I must take up with avarice.

They are commiting murder who merely live.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

Fighting is not the best way to win an argument. If carried to its ultimate conclusions, the old idea of "an eye for an eye" eventually ends in making everybody blind.

Left alone with our own heads on, we can be pretty mental.

It is a basilisk unto mine eye, Kills me to look on't.