“It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.”

Character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

Your trouble’s easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Justice is like the kingdom of God–it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.

The brilliance of Max Brooks is that he always quotes authorities at the back of his books that never existed. Like a Russian professor he made up that validates a story or character.

There’s an army story in me, and I think there’s a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I never stepped foot into a Brooks Brothers before Mad Men.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.