He had always prided himself on his ability to bargain, to bluff, to contain his ever-aching heart within the folds of his robes where no one could see his pain and his shame. Unconsciously, he reached up and fisted the little black pearl in his fingers, searching for words, praying to the Almighty for the words that would let him have her. But they would not come.They were not needed, when the truth was in his eyes.

No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.

Greil Marcus

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

Joyce Maynard

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

Thomas Carlyle

It's better to swim in the sea belowThan to swing in the air and feed the crow,Says jolly Ned Teach of Bristol.

Benjamin Franklin

He broke fresh ground-because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood. He had no need for the divided responsibility in which others seek to be safe from ridicule, because he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation-a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self- destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind was loving.

Dag Hammarskjold

If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy.

Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severi

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

Thomas Wolfe

Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene.

Mark Twain

Radical simply means grasping things at the root.

Angela Y. Davis

The sky is falling. The sun is rising.

Steven Wright

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

Larry Wall

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr.