“All right – I’ll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me.”

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, ‘Please — a little less love, and a little more common decency’.

And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It’s good for you.

My life is nothing but room for you. I said. It could never be filled by anyone but you.

We’d been apart so long-I’d been dead so long, she said in English. I thought surely you’d built a new life, with no room in it for me. I’d hoped that.

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.

The nicest veterans, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

Maturity, is knowing what your limitations are, Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.

In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.

Believe nothing of me except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own.

For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

We are God’s gift to each other. Like a master composer, He brings all the instruments together, each with a different tone, each playing a different part, and He makes it turn out so beautifully.

It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

Lacking strength beauty hates the understanding for asking of her what it cannot do.