“It’s not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it’s yours, and then be willing to let it go.”

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.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, Leave no path untaken.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?

I would like to see anyone, prophet, king, or God, convince a thousand cats to do the same thing at the same time.

You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel.

The idea of God is a form of the idea of the Infinite.

The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.

The bigotry of theologians is a malady which seems almost incurable.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

The greatest malfunction of spirit is to believe things.

When one works and imagines and dreams of nothing else than the search for answers that God has posed, it is difficult to be so still.