1st Jailer: [looking in records] Miriam, wife... Tirzah, daughter. Drusus: Yes, they're the ones. Are they alive? 1st Jailer: [examining the records, he is pessimistic] East section... lower level. Cell two. The jailer in that wing will know. [Drusus...
Deckard: [narrating] I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life - anybody's life; my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come f...
...And Brick and I say in unison, “As long as I’m here.” This is a guy thing. You never want to acknowledge that you and another guy had exactly the same thought in exactly the same words and that you spoke them aloud . . .at exactly the same t...
The doctor in Murare is old - old for anybody. He is especially old for a doctor and especially old for an African. But he doesn´t have the luxury of retirement to look forward to. There aren´t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become d...
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ear...
Love is a way of living so how can our souls be healthy enough to live without love. I will continue to love you for as long as I have life because you've showed me the light. I always look forward to waking up in the morning because you're there wai...
How can we who are so weak in ourselves, so inferior in power to the enemies confronting us, bear up under our trials which are so numerous, so protracted, so crushing? We could not, and therefore Divine grace has provided for us an all-sufficient He...
The person who will make you feel different, who will tell you about your imperfections, who will show you and will let you experience the things you've thought that only exist in your dreams, can be happiness and or sadness. Yes they are real, the p...
For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead - out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't rea...
Words I ONCE HEARD A MAN SAY OR WAS IT SOMEWHERE I READ, OR MAYBE SOMETHING I WROTE A THOUSAND TIMES IN MY MIND. YOU GOT TO FIND YOUR OWN MEANING IN THIS WORLD. NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU CHANGED, YOU STILL HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE FOR THE THINGS YOU HAVE D...
Life is short and you die at the end of it. But everyone wants to have a sense of purpose for their life no matter how long or short that life is. There is no greater purpose than to have the courage to be a member of one's country's military and thu...
Some days you get up and you already know that things aren't going to go well. They're the type of days when you should just give in, put your pajamas back on, make some hot chocolate and read comic books in bed with the covers up until the world loo...
May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten. I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy. I look inside and there are her ...
The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experime...
The library smells like old books-a thousand leather doorways into other worlds." "Dear sir, I was called away and couldn't bring you, but now I feel haunted. I know that sometimes you felt I was a part of you and that losing me would leave a hole in...
... I will get a First Class Honors degree and I will become a scientist... And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a bo...
Manuscripts - at least for Muslims who understand the subject - are to be read as books whose contents are to be known and understood, for that is why they were written, and not to be regarded as enigmatic specimens for critical textual and philologi...
What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?" sleeve asked primly. The Calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: "It is right and proper," he said, "...
Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you...
Our lives are made up of choices. Big ones, small ones, strung together by the thin air of good intentions; a line of dominoes, ready to fall. Which shirt to wear on a cold winter's morning, what crappy junk food to eat for lunch. It starts out so in...
I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then...
