“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.”

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.

You remind me of a smoked cigarette.

There’s no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don’t feel it at all.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

Someday I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.

No matter how low you go, there’s always an unexplored basement.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.

The greatest profound pain is cased by, and is the result of our own illusions, fantasies and dreams.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.

So we’ll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

You are a dangerous collection of all my favorite things. An old soul, a heart of gold, and hands that make my body sing.

We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.

When people throw stones at you, don’t throw them back. Collect them all and build an empire.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century

Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

The larger the mass of collected things, the less will be their usefulness. Therefore, one should not only strive to assemble new goods from everywhere, but one must endeavor to put in the right order those that one already possesses.

And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.