“People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

The world is before you, and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Those who say it can’t be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.

Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.

True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.

Colour is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.

Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.

You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

Literature is indispensable to the world.

It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

The truth springs from arguments amongst friends.

Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.

I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.

There are people that start a fire in us that keeps warming us on the dark days.

There needs to be a foundation of friendship cause everything else fades.

Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

My treasure lies in my friends .

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.