“You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.”

I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.

I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

After the fall of communism in Poland, we had a post-communist as president for two terms: Aleksander Kwasniewski. He was very good. He brought Poland into NATO and the European Union.

Shakespeare was a smart dude. He was the president of Rome.

The man’s Bush embarrassing. He’s not my president and he never will be either.

How can we help President Obama?

We’re a long way from the embargo ending. Look at what just happened with the rollback of Obama’s Cuba policies. Two idiot congressmen convinced our idiot president to make it harder on Cubans on the island.

The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.

The Presidents Woodruff and Smith both said they were willing for such a ceremony to occur, if done in Mexico, and Pres. Woodruff promised the Lord’s blessing to follow such an act.