“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.”

Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.

I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.

Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.

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

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go.

I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

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.

Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.

You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.

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.

Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.

You have to sing every day so you can build up to being, you know, Amazingly Brilliant.

Without love, deeds, even the most brilliant, count as nothing.

All living creatures are sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance, emerging from God like the rays of the sun.

Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be temporarily buried in mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.

I’ve still got a brilliant head of hair, which refuses to lay down.

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.