True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.Collection: Love
Love means not ever having to say you're sorry.Collection: Love
I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
I went into Harvard one way and came out a different person... It's the air at Harvard; it's like a Renaissance court.
Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.
It takes someone very special to help you forget someone very special.Collection: Special
I was afraid of being rejected, yes. I was also afraid of being accepted for the wrong reasons.Collection: Love
We have turned doctors into gods and worship their deity by offering up our bodies and our souls - not to mention our worldly goods. And yet paradoxically, they are the most vulnerable of human beings. Their suicide rate is eight times the national average. Their percentage of drug addiction is one hundred times higher And because they are painfully aware that they cannot live up to our expectations, their anguish is unquantifiably intense. They have aptly been called 'wounded healers.' " ~ Barney Livingston, M.D. (Doctors, 1989)Collection: Suicide
Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madnessCollection: Genius
Part of being a big winner is the ability to be a big loser. There is no paradox involved. It is a distinctly Harvard thing to be able to turn any defeat into victoryCollection: Victory
The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.Collection: Pain
Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn't loveCollection: May
although science could pinpoint the exact spot in the brain that ignites rage, they had yet to identify the location that produces love.Collection: Brain
And then I did what I had never done in his presence, much less in his arms. I cried.Collection: Tragedy
The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.Collection: People
What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.Collection: Beautiful
Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?Collection: Heroism
He had then warned his daughter not to violate the Eleventh Commandment. "Which one is that?" I asked her. "Do not bullshit thy father," she said.Collection: Daughter
Sometimes I ask myself what would I be if Jenny were alive. And then I answer : I would also be alive." - Oliver.Collection: Answers
The explanations for the things we do in life are many and complex. Supposedly mature adults should live by logic, listen to their reason. Think things out before they act. But maybe they never heard what Dr. London told me one, Freud said that for the little things in life we should react according to our reason. But for really big decisions, we should heed what our unconscious tells us.Collection: Thinking
What term do you employ when you speak of your progenitor?" I answered with the term I'd always wanted to employ. "Sonovabitch." "To his face?" she asked. "I never see his face." "He wears a mask?" "In a way, yes. Of stone. Of absolute stone.Collection: Stones
There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling.Collection: Fall
What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?Collection: Girl
Jenny, if you're so convinced I'm a loser, why did you bulldoze me into buying you coffee?' She looked me straight in the eye and smiled. 'I like your body,' she said.Collection: Eye
But what does he do to qualify as a sonovabitch?” Jenny asked. “Make me”, I replied. “Beg pardon?” “Make me”, I repeated. Her eyes widened like saucers. “You mean like incest?” she asked. “Don’t give me your family problems, Jen. I have enough of my own.” “Like what, Oliver?” she asked, “like just what is it he makes you do?” “The ‘right things’”, I said. “What’s wrong with the ‘right things’?” she asked, delighting in the apparent paradox.Collection: Mean
Her handwriting was curious small sharp little letters with no capitals (who did she think she was, e. e. cummings?).Collection: Thinking
Please, if one of us cries, let both of us cry. But preferably neither of us.Collection: Cry
I think the Peace Corps is a fine thing, don't you?" he said. "Well," I replied, "it's certainly better than War Corps.Collection: War