“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

If there is a God what the hell is He for?

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.

He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

She was the captain of her soul

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…

Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts… That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth…

Try to be better than yourself.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Egyptians believe in the power of the sunrise. They believe each morning begins not just a new day, but a new world.

What I love best in life is new starts.

Well, we think that time “passes,” flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see.

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Every Christmas Eve, the elves will come and give us a new pair of pajamas.

I don’t have time for the news clippings. I got my own mission.

The media must be used effectively to reach the masses. You have to find a new language in which to address the people and demonstrate what is possible.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life–or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window.