And now I'm looking at you," he said, "and you're asking me if I still want you, as if I could stop loving you. As if I would want to give up the thing that makes me stronger than anything else ever has. I never dared give much of myself to anyone before ? bits of myself to the Lightwoods, to Isabelle and Alec, but it took years to do it ? but, Clary, since the first time I saw you, I have belonged to you completely. I still do. If you want me.

Religion did not exist for the saving of souls but for the preservation and welfare of society and in all that was necessary to this end every man had to take his part or break with the domestic and political community to which he belonged.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone for someone pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery's version of the Barack Obama 'Hope' poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama's Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists' Washington the place we learned to despise during the last administration.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

As children we recognized that we belonged to an unusual even exceptional family but the effect was different on each of us.

I sang in the choir for years even though my family belonged to another church.

When I look back over my life it's almost as if there was a plan laid out for me - from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn't afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

Bulls can do nothing to demand justice. They can only defend themselves as best they can in a fight with a pre-determined ending and die never knowing why they were forced to endure such a painful and prolonged death. It's up to us as a civilized society to call for an end to the Running of the Bulls and bullfighting.

People could rationally decide that prolonged relationships take up too much time and effort and that they'd much rather do other kinds of things. But most people are afraid of rejection.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

All changes even the most longed for have their melancholy for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves we must die to one life before we can enter another.

I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.

As a young man even if I was going to see a play or a film by myself I didn't feel like I was alone. There was something that was unfolding up there that brought me into it. And I recognised that. For those two hours it made me feel like I belonged to something really good.