“Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.”

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.

Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.

What makes loneliness an anguish is not that I have no one to share my burden, but this: I have only my own burden to bear.

The myths have always condemned those who ‘looked back.’ Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.

It is playing safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.

To forgive oneself? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only believe this is possible if we ourselves can forgive.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.

The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others.

I am the vessel. The draft is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.

It is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.

Life yields only to the conqueror. Never accept what can be gained by giving in. You will be living off stolen goods, and your muscles will atrophy.

Liberty is never safer than when politicans are terrified.

70% of children born into poverty will never make it to the middle class. The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours. In fact, more people in Canada go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.

It’s always a revolution, you know, when things occur of which you have never happened to hear!

You never make any of the shots you never take. 87% of the ones you do take, you’ll miss too. I make 110% of my shots.

If your goal is to be comfortable, chances are you’ll never get rich. But if your goal is to be rich, chances are you’ll end up mighty comfortable.

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.