Grief,she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who've forgotten their own childhood.

Ulysses, obviously. It was an elaborate prank, and our supposed intellectual elite continue to fall for it.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.

Make friends. Be a leader. Kiss butts if you have to, but if the other guys despise you-you know what I mean?