We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Never a choice. Always being rescued.

To find purpose in our problems, to see past the ugliness, rather than step back, we should get closer. Only then will we notice the beauty.

Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of these discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers.

Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear.

Maxims are texts to which we turn in danger or sorrow, and we often find what seems to have been expressly written for our use.

My heart is broken, he told himself. It was at that moment he understood the profound meaning of that common phrase: he thought he heard the sound of glass breaking and felt that the essence of his being was pouring out until he was empty, with no memory of the past, no awareness of the present, no hope for the future.

She owed no one an explanation; if she had made mistakes she had been duly punished by giving up her family, suffering in the hold of the ship, losing her baby, and facing a future of total uncertainty.

The few exiles who returned to the hospital were received with much less fanfare, because it was unwise to attract attention. This was the tacit slogan throughout the country: don't provoke the military, so as to pretend the recent past was buried and in the process of being forgotten.

I wait for you to complete the voyage into yourself, for the old wounds to heal. I know that when you return from your nightmares, we shall again walk hand in hand, as before.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them," wrote Margaret Atwood.