“I couldn’t help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for–to find out how much a man could take without breaking.”

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

Maturity, is knowing what your limitations are, Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

There are too many of us and we are all too far apart.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

I can have oodles of charm when I want to.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, It might have been.

Departments and groups within the team must break down silos, depend on each other and understand who depends on them.

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring. Renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed.

To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head.

So many will try to destroy me. So many, over and over, coming in periods of greatness. But in this period, I cannot be broken.

It is never too late to turn on the light. Your ability to break an unhealthy habit or turn off an old tape doesn’t depend on how long it has been running; a shift in perspective doesn’t depend on how long you’ve held on to the old view.

Trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it’s broken, but you can still see the crack in that mother fucker’s reflection.