“If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones. After all, there are better ways to starve to death.”

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .

It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

Even when the winds of misfortune blow, amazing things can still happen.

For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don’t last your whole life.

She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she’ll be sorry if she isn’t guided by her heart.

Just imagine, a cow on the balcony of the nation, what an awful thing, what a shitty country.

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.

You’re always welcome if you find someone better than me.

It is better to have done something than to have been someone.

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

Nelson Mandela, a better man, not a bitter man, made our world a better place in which to live. His life and leadership exemplify the highest courage, dignity, and dedication to human liberation.

My mother made countless sacrifices so that her children – and all children – could grow up in a better nation and world.

A Christian is nothing but a sinful man who has put himself to school for Christ for the honest purpose of becoming better.

Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

Who takes care of their people better? FEMA or Hezbollah?