"Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart: you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning."

"Whenever I hear you saying, rise and shine, rise and shine, it makes me think how lucky dead people are!"

"What's so wrong with feeling sorry for myself? Better that than trying to get other people to feel sorry for me."

"Home is where the people who live there need me to come home to them, and worry about me when I'm gone. There's no such place on this earth, no matter how far I drive."

"I've known too many men who never quite felt married no matter how many wives they'd been through. Their own and otherwise."

"Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived."

"Why give you answers you wont believe? Well, answers I don't believe would be a step forward."

"The ways of love are strange and hard: the love you want is always barred; the love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange."

"When you have enough money the law is a reed that will always bend your way."

"You are exactly what you seem, and so you always assume that other people are, too."

"[He] wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there."

"She had that irony in her eyes. Knowledge without wisdom. Power without purpose. Like me."

"All children are manipulators."

"What is this thing between women, like men are a joke that women all told each other long ago but men never get it."

"Deep inside himself, in a place he didn't often go, where he kept the things he didn't like to think about but dared not forget, he knew that [she] was still alive somewhere, and somehow she was watching what he did, or at least looking in on him from time to time."

"Love is random; fear is inevitable."

"Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price."

"It was always from the love of strong women that he had found whatever joy had been granted him in his life."

"You just refuse to leave them alone until they change their minds. Of their own free will."

"You are sure your enemy is stupid because he doesn't do things as you would do them. It will make you careless, and your enemy will surprise you."

"They don't know how to watch things. They don't know how to see anything but what they expect to see."

"The older you get, the more you believe in God, whatever face he wears."

"First we try to preserve ourselves, until we see that we can't. Then we try to preserve our children, until we see we can't. Then we act to preserve our kin, and then our village or tribe, and when we see we can't preserve even them, then we act in order to preserve our memory. And if we can't do that, what is left?"

"We are the actors and the audience as well, all of us. And the critics. We are also the critics."

"How is clean, painless nonexistence any worse than clean, painless death?"

"She will look at you as women look at men, and she will judge you as women judge men — not on the strength of their arguments, and not on their cleverness or prowess in battle, but rather on the force of their character, the intensity of their passion, the strength of their soul, their compassion, and — ah, this above all — their conversation."

"What sort of arrogance did she have, even to imagine reaching back into the past and making changes? Who am I, she thought, if I dare to answer prayers intended for the gods?"

"His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life."

"When we intended to enjoy being cruel, we must transform our victim into either a beast or a god."

"The vision of the gods without the power of the gods. What a terrible gift.A glorious gift."

"You never needed anybody. If you had ever bothered to come to know me, you'd know that that is the exact opposite of the truth. Well, well. So we part in utter ignorance of each other."

"She did love him, you know... It was a selfish, possessive love, but it was all she knew how to give."

"I think if you left grownups to do what they really actually wanted most in the world to do, every single one of them would lie down and take a nap for the rest of their life. I know this because that's what every grownup does as soon as they're alone."

"What I am seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult."

"They gave me powers of thought and memory far beyond anything natural evolution would have given me, but that doesn't give them the right to decide the meaning of my life as if I were some dream. I decide the meaning. If my life is a dream then it's my dream, I'm the dreamer."

"Keeping secrets was the beginning of freedom."

"She sounded how you'd expect talking to a tree to sound - bored out of her mind."

"Adolescents never understand that the best way to avoid notice is to behave normally."

"We were all victims of an oppressive system, but that mattered far less to us than our deep bonding with our owners."

"Even the most "Rational" people — the ones who claimed not to have a religion — were just as chauvinistic about their irreligion, sneering at and ostracizing the believers just the way the believers treated nonmembers of their own groups. It's a human universal."

"There's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing."

"This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don't want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn't that bad. And it isn't that hard."

"Even the good she found in him was really the goodness she had put in him, the goodness he had put on himself as a disguise in order to get her to marry him."

"There was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn't approve of her and didn't want her in his life anymore."

"He exuded confidence without ever looking as if he wanted to make sure everyone else knew how confident he was."

"You were born with compassion, only that also means that when people are cruel to you it cuts you deep. You won't understand that you have to walk right up to the ones who are being hateful and laugh in their faces and earn their respect. Instead you'll try to figure out what you did to make them mad at you."

"I began to suspect that the ultimate sacrifice isn't death after all; the ultimate sacrifice is willingly bearing the fullest penalty for your own actions."

"I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their lands and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me."

"You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else."