“Terrible thing to live in fear.”

“There's a harsh truth to face: I'm not going to make it on the outside.”

“I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”

“Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes, really.”

“I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it.”

“After enough time passes, you get to depend on them. That's institutionalized.”

“These prison walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them.”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

“There's plenty of sense in nonsense sometimes, if you wish to look for it.”

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”

“All the world's a stage.”

“A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”

“Don't Panic.”

“It's not natural for women to fight.”

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger, but recognize the opportunity.”

“I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

“You believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself.”

“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”

“We all have our time machines, don't we? Those that take us back are memories, and those that carry us forward are dreams.”

“If you want to forget something or someone, never hate them. Everything and everyone you hate is engraved on your heart; if you want to let go or forget, you cannot hate.”

“It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.”

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me' — that's intimacy.”

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”

“To see a world in a grain of sand.”

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”

“Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?”

“Why are women so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”

“Forever is composed of nows.”

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”

“That's part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.”

“You're wishin' too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

“He's a wallflower. You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand.”

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”

“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”

“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.”

“What is love? I met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.”