Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Whether for life or death, do your own work well.

They died hard, those savage men – like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Love is only one of many passions.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

No matter how prepared you think you are for the death of a loved one, it still comes as a shock, and it still hurts very deeply.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

I definitely don’t think that money can buy you love. It can buy you affection but certainly not love.

The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.

Every nation whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

Actually, you have to be a little bit in love with your leading man and vice versa. If you’re going to portray love, you have to feel it. You can’t do it any other way. But you don’t carry it beyond the set.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it’s also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror – not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

It always seems to me so odd that when a man dies, he takes out with him all the knowledge that he has got in his lifetime whilst sowing his wild oats or winning successes. And he leaves his sons or younger brothers to go through all the work of learning it over again from their own experience.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

I’m an emotional person.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

I have good days and bad days.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Those movies sure got me into a rut.

I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.

Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.

Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.

Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing – not the ‚what happens‘ but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

When the kids are laughing in the audience, I tear up, I’m so happy I did a nice thing.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?