“Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.”

I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.

You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.

No matter how low you go, there’s always an unexplored basement.

Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had.

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.

For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.

The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one’s mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind

Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

The most important thing a writer can have [is] the ability to live with the constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.

No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.

Patience is the ability to accept trouble, suffering, delay without getting angry or upset, I feel like if you can master patience you can master anything.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.