He knew that his wings could ignite at any moment, but the closer he came to touching the fire, the more he sensed that he was fulfilling his destiny. As he put it in his journal that night: If I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of destroying it.
Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...
They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.
But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.
He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen.
This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself.
It was something like the word ‘it’ in the phrase ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is night’. What that ‘it’ referred to Quinn had never known.
I cannot say who I will be tomorrow. Each day is new, and each day I am born again. I see hope everywhere, even in the dark, and when I die, I will perhaps become God.
It was never possible for him to be where he was. For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.
People pushed by force of habit, pushed for the pure pleasure of pushing, and they would go on pushing until you showed them you were willing to push back, at which point you would earn their respect.
Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.
We are all aliens to ourselves.
For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition.
There’s an imp inside me, and if I don’t let him out to make some mischief now and then, the world just gets too damned dull. I hate feeling grumpy and bored. I’m an enthusiast, and the more dangerous my life becomes, the happier I am.
Our hearts know what is in them, even if our mouths remain silent. And the world will know what it is, even when nothing remains in our hearts.
If you look into someone’s face long enough, eventually you’re going to feel that you’re looking at yourself.
Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination.
The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.