The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the good byes that tell us we're still alive

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure

Oh shit, the mummy's after us, let's all walk a little faster

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures...

Everyone loves something for nothing...even if it costs everything.

Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind

Sometimes real love is silent as well as blind.

Weird love's better than no love at all

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover

Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?

True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring — once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome… except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners. And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.

A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

Each of us has to do his little bit toward transforming this spirit of the times.

The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest.

One flower is beautiful, a surfeit of flowers is vulgar.

The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything.

Imagination is the highest form of research.

It is true that my parents were worried because I began to speak relatively late, so much so that they consulted a doctor. I can’t say how old I was then, certainly not less than three.