Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?

One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.

A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.

Love is always in the mood of believing in miracles.

To a real child anything will serve as a toy.

The strongest of all psychic forces in the world is unsatisfied desire.

The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.

Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.

The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.

"The meaning of culture" is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

Words cannot be remote from reality when they create reality.

Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child.

Basketball used to be my top priority.

But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.

For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars, but on the earth He has sowed his name in tender flowers.

Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America-we continue to rise and rise, like dough, until Jesus bakes us in the fiery Afterscape of the Rapture.

I think, as far as branching out with acting, it would take something really right on the mark to distract me from music, because music is everything to me.

It were better to be a soldier's widow than a coward's wife.

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.