The most wicked criminals have God on their lips at all times, for God is the only one who can stomach them.

What is one person's diversion may be another's supreme test.

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.

Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.

Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine - that is, activity - which could solve it, is seen as odious.

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.