“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

“In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.”

“Parachuting has taught us to be strong, and only those are needed by our country”

“We know what goes on in the act of love, and those of us who are writers despair of ever finding verbal equivalents for the pain and pleasure of excitation fulfilled in what Rabelais’s translator Urquhart called ‘venerean ecstasy’. A mechanical description of the act tells us nothing, any more than a scientifically accurate account of mastication will convey the flavour of roast duck.”

“Nothing ever goes wrong.”

“Everything passes, but nothing entirely goes away.”

“History, if it has taught us anything at all, has taught us that the strange ideas we deride today will one day be our celebrated truths.”

“We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.”

“None of us ever knows what impact we have on the world around us.”

“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.”