“Time is the thief of memory.”

If the stuff you’re writing is not for yourself, it won’t work.

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.

The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.

Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

You want to remember that while you’re judging the book, the book is also judging you.

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

I always say, keep a diary and someday it’ll keep you.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

Memories mean more to me than dresses.

I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.

There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories.

The darkest moments of our lives are not to be buried and forgotten, rather they are a memory to be called upon for inspiration to remind us of the unrelenting human spirit and our capacity to overcome the intolerable.

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored