“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”

Oh, love isn’t there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.

The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure.

You are willing to die, you coward, but not to live.

Every experience has its element of magic.

As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.

Faith and doubt go hand in hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.

Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.

Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.

I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.

Loneliness is the way by which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself.

Love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.

We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.

Life is waiting everywhere, the future is flowering everywhere, but we only see a small part of it and step on much of it with our feet

If I know what love is, it is because of you.

Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a moment, just long enough for a joke.

All life was a breath exhaled by God. All dying was a breath inhaled by God.

Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.

In the books I read the sinners are always more interesting than the saints, and in real life good people are dismally dull. I’ve no desire to be wicked, but I do want to be happy. A short life and a gay one for me and I’m willing to pay for my pleasure if it is necessary.

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

My book came out; and people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all.