Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

You're too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

The truth of the story lies in the details.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

And now we get to the hard part. the endings, the farewells, and the famous last words. if you don't hear from me often, remember that you're in my thoughts.

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

We find ourselves only by looking to what we’re not.

Dismantling the architecture of my discontent

The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence.

Just think it, and chances are it will happen.

But even the facts do not always tell the truth

It's June second, he told himself. Try to remember that. This is New York, and tomorrow will be June third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

Wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

It often happens that things are other than what they seem, and you can get yourself into trouble by jumping to conclusions.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.

Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

You can survive only if nothing is necessary to you

It's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

...once you fell in love with her, you loved her until the day you died.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Every man is the author of his own life.

Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...

To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

Eighteen is a terrible age, and while I walked around with the conviction that I was somehow more grown-up than my classmates, the truth was that I had merely found a different way of being young.

You can’t punish someone for a lack of affection, can you? You can’t force a child to love you just because he’s your child.

As long as you are dreaming, there is always a way out

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.