“In the end, I closed our book and never dared to read it again.”

In places where everyone is beautiful, i am tempted to toy with my ugly.

We have to be strong, for the ones that came before us, and the ones who are yet to come.

One defeat does not define you.

So be bold, run free and live like poetry.

So we danced in the rain and woke to the haze of a sunrise painted in honey.

So i swept our stardust under the rug, and discovered a magic of my own.

Free spirit, The world is yours.

The longer you sit in the field, forcing fragile stalks together, the more you value the loops, the links that stay. And the less you miss the ones that snap and blow away.

Even when your tears have soaked through the last pages of your book, the sun will dry them and illuminate every word of your story.

So keep rowing against the current, no one ever made an epic voyage through smooth sailing.

You lit a flame in me that could start wildfires.

I pined for the whole of you, but all I ever got was half. I waited and gave you twice of me-yet still it wasn’t enough.

The silence was broken with the music of your pain, but with every note i could see a part of you healing.

Whiskey lips and sunset trips to places we always spoke of, wind in hair we had no care for what tomorrow was made of.

I believed in the magic we made, but you were the magician and i was merely your puppet on stage.

Why not accept your beautiful mess? and care a little less?

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.

Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I’ve done. I find it strange, but I also feel it’s my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.

Impossible is the word for fools in my dictionary.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

The Bible is a book that has been read more and examined less than any book that ever existed.

Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way – through the power of words – to change the world.

I just downloaded eleven hundred books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.