“When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.”

Everything takes time… and that’s something that your generation find it a lot harder to adjust to.

You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.

Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.

if you had your mother at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.

The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you,

…I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn’t have met, and who didn’t like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.

A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.

Some mistakes… Just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you.

You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?”

There is a hunger in you. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.

Oh, Clark,if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now.And I…i can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s Not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just…accepts.

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

But don’t blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she’s still experimenting.

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.

Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?

One can learn anything, anything at all, I thought, if provided by a gifted and passionate teacher.

My own laugh is the real thing and I’ve had it all my life.

Trade is critical to us all – it ensures we have what we need to live, that the NHS gets the equipment it needs to save lives, and that developing countries can prosper.

It’s all about knowing the balance, because I like to remain somewhat of a mystery. You need to have that, you know what I mean?

If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.

Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.