“Unhappiness is a dangerous thing, like carbon monoxide. You don’t smell it, you don’t taste it, it’s formless and colourless, but it poisons slowly. It seeps into every pore of your skin until one day your heart just stops beating.”

Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he’s never counted.

I think women sign on for some ideal when they get married, and when they realise they haven’t got anything close to what they want, they bury their disappointment.

You don’t need to know what you’re escaping from to become a fugitive.

If America is the land of opportunity, a country where perseverance and hard work is rewarded by recognition, then an illegal harbors the opposite ambitions. His greatest reward us anonymity, invisibility.

Children expect their mothers to love them, no matter what. Those who don’t get this tend to feel cheated the rest of their lives.

Discontented women are like pressure cookers. The steam rises and one day they just reach boiling point.

Let me tell you something: You can live in a broken home, you can play with a broken toy, but you cannot love with a broken heart.

People aren’t often asked to make life or death decisions. There are no causes to die for. You can go through life never knowing which of your friends would really come through for you

Women only cut their hair in times of crisis… It’s somethin’ a woman always has the power to do, even when she loses control over everything else. Cuttin’ hair is a cry for help.

The world exists on thousands of different levels and just because some are more tragic than others, it doesn’t make them any more valid. You fall into that way of thinking and you become so overwhelmed by the world’s suffering, you go mad.

Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

Stirring and smelling things so we would understand how things were made.

Having no consideration (regardless or irrespective of) for others (“autrui”, Fr.), than we physically are by a sickening (or nauseating) smell.

Whether we had a (good) moral intuition more developed, we would be as much morally disgusted by the rapacity of those who try to benefit from, and monopolize (or secure or corner).

I even love the smell of books.

I even love the smell of books.

You could smell them because of the oil they were burning.