“I desire to have both heaven and hell ever in my eye, while I stand on this isthmus of life, between two boundless oceans.”

Source: Life of Pi

Writing and Being (1991)
Context: I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses — the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)
Variant: The principal difference between heaven and hell is the company you keep there.

在天願作比翼鳥
在地願為連理枝
天長地久有時盡
此恨綿綿無絶期
The last four lines.
"A Song of Unending Sorrow"

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Interludes, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 193

Source: Lucky