“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”

All your questions can be answered if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Not only are there no happy endings,’ she told him, ‘there aren’t even any endings.

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

An Angel who did not so much fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.

I think; therefore I am.

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.

All acquired power consists in command over some of the powers of other man.

I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power, that ceases only in death.

The first and fundamental law of Nature, which is, to seek peace and follow it.

Every part of the universe is ‘body’ and that which is not ‘body’ is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere.

What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?