Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.