Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.

Ask people for help. You'll be all right. Don't worry. It's a great adventure, your life, and it has only just begun.

Some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

One of the ironies of courage, and the reason why we prize it so highly, is that we find it easier to be brave for someone else than we do for ourselves alone.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.

but there's no nation uncorrupted. there's no system that's immune to the misuse of money.