“If you're trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It's obvious, Li-ling, ...”

“The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.”

“I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?”

“The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.”

“Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious-economic freedom and political reform-a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one...”

“The young man murmured in his sleep and said, Dear Sparrow, and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.”

“He had accessorized his life with everything but paternal instinct.”

“Even Dad likes it," said Caddy, and her father agreed that he did. In a way. Being a broad-minded, tolerant, artistic sort of person. Or so people told him..."Oh, yes?" said Saffron, rolling her ey...”

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”

“I've never heard anyone say "I wish I hadn't forgiven.”

“We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry, or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck. But part of it has got to be forgiveness an...”