Words worth keeping

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

Happiness [is] only real when shared

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.

No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.

Every great love starts with a great story...

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.

He thinks he'll be remembered as the villain in the story. But I forgot to tell him that the villain is usually the person who locks up the maiden and throws away the key. He was the one who let me out.