I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
The story of life is quicker than the wink of an eye, the story of love is hello and goodbye...until we meet again
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus. [The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)]
When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred.
Sometimes I just think depression's one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed. Because there's so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.
No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.
Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.
I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.
Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.
What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.
The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.
If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.
Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar
He knew one of the women well, and had shared his universe with her. They had seen the same mountains, and the same trees, although each of them had seem them differently. She knew his weaknesses, his moments of hatred, of despair. Yet she was there at his side. They shared the same universe.