“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.

Inspiration gives no warnings.

He pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill with words.

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.

The truth is I’m getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don’t feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.

Old people, with other old people, are not so old.

The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.

We’ll grow old waiting.

And it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.

It’s up to all of us to decide the future we want to live in.

I knew you’d decide to be all right again.

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

We get to decide what the future of this country looks like. We get to choose hope.

The angels decided to shine on me for a little while.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

We all can be masters at our craft, but you have to make sacrifices that come along with making that decision.

When obstacles arise, you change your direction to reach your goal; you do not change your decision to get there.