“No sermon I have heard or read touched my heart with half the force of this puppet show. John Quincy Adams”

“Shakespeare's work had a liberating influence.”

“John Quincy Adams strove to escape commonplace thoughts.”

“Rather than pound or a national mind that he believed had been closed by his critics, John Quincy Adams decided to seek a place in the is the esteem of future generations.”

“The author points out that the moral failure of Abigail Adams' brother focused her on disciplining her children, and herself, so that they did not come to the same end.”

“The two grappled in the quiet of old-fashioned personal diplomacy.”

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people b...”

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”

“And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into...”

“The pain of the flesh is naught to that of the heart”

“Its something of a clich, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.”

“People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?”

“The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.”

“And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.”

“Hearts are connected by the slenderest of threads.”