“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”

The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.

Choices not chance determine your destiny.

The chances are perhaps more in favour of ruin than of success. But, whatever may be the chances, I shall go on as long as any means of carrying on the fight are at my disposal.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

When you consider what a chance women have to poison their husbands, it’s a wonder there isn’t more of it done

I don’t know who I will collaborate with, but there’s a great chance of something happening.

There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.