Don Rumsfeld is the finest secretary of defense the nation has ever had.
Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.
If you want something badly enough, you make arrangements. If you don't want it badly enough, you make excuses.
England has become a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place. . . an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian, rat-hole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines.
And silence, like darkness, can be kind; it, too, is a language.
Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.
No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times.
the boys had learned that laughter stilled anxiety. It cleared away mystery. If you could laugh at something, it erased its importance.
Most people who succeed in the face of seemingly impossible conditions are people who simply don't know how to quit.
The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer's boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.