The ability to be alone is the ability to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those who can be alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another human being—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

Efficiency is the first virtue of engineers.

"The best stories are those that leave room for the reader's imagination."

小说的力量在于它能让我们感到不那么孤独。

If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weeds.