Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

To be honest, I think kids have got a lot more going on than adults. They’ve got their heads screwed on a lot better.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

Money can’t buy life.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‚try to be a little kinder.‘

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

You’re not going to say anything about me that I’m not going to say about myself. There’s so many things that I think about myself; if someone really wanted to get at me, they could say this and this and this. So I’m going to say it before they can. It’s the best policy for me.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

If you would judge, understand.

I am in my own head most of the time.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

Every wall is a door.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life, which is impossible to the pure egoist.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg – I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Wealth is not his that has it, but his that enjoys it.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.

How we experience memory sometimes, it’s not linear. We’re not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we’re just seeing it in flashes overlaid.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn’t a rule about this. But there’s a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year, and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

I don’t think I would be interested in the climate at all if I had been like everyone else.

My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work rather than just a 16-bar verse.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.