Often the magical elements in my books are standing in for elements of the real world the small and magical-in-their-own-right sorts of things that we take for granted and no longer pay attention to like the bonds of friendship that entwine our own lives with those of other people and places.

In friendship as well as love ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.

Friendship may and often does grow into love but love never subsides into friendship.

Friendship often ends in love but love in friendship - never.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame very pretty often hot and fierce but still only light and flickering. As love grows older our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals deep-burning and unquenchable.

A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us we often find that it is those who instead of giving advice solutions or cures have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.

Where globalization means as it so often does that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

I am but one member of a vast team made up of many organizations officials thousands of scientists and millions of farmers - mostly small and humble - who for many years have been fighting a quiet oftentimes losing war on the food production front.

Women oftentimes are the ones making those economic decisions sitting around the kitchen table and trying to figure out how to pay for rising gas prices or food prices or the health insurance costs. And I think that they see where they expect their leaders in Congress to also make those tough decisions.

You think about some of the most memorable meals you've ever had the food will be good but it will often be about locating a mental memory and taste is inexorably linked to all the other senses and memory so ultimately it is all about taste.

The food in the House of Commons is fairly good. The cafe in Portcullis House is really very high quality and you also have a choice of eating in the more traditional restaurants the Churchill Room or the Members' Dining Room. I don't often eat in them though as I'm usually on the run.

Shop often shop hard and spend for the best stuff available - logic dictates that you can make delicious food only with delicious ingredients.

Food prices are often kept artificially high. The result is that the Millennium Development Goals set out by the United Nations at the start of the new millennium are not being reached. Fine words have not yet been turned into deeds.

I've often said that the most important thing you can give your children is wings. Because you're not gonna always be able to bring food to the nest. You're... sometimes... they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves.

The Republican Party is not in the hands of the Jewish lobby in America as the Democratic Party must look quite often to Jewish money to finance candidates.

There's enormous progressive activism and more often than not success at the grassroots level - everything from living wage campaigns to efforts to finance our elections are having terrific success.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary although it has often been made has never proved widely persuasive.

When as we must often do we fear science we really fear ourselves.

President Obama is doing the right thing by offering young immigrants most often in this country through no action of their own a chance to live and work openly free from the fear of deportation.

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth for as a rule they make many others die with them often before them at times instead of them.

I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.