Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

My life isn't that dramatic. My dad really loves me, he just can't talk on the phone. He's too crippled and shy, and that's almost harder. He's there and he loves me, and I try and try and try, it's just impossible to have a relationship.

Joey Lauren Adams

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Jane Austen

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a

Nay, number itself in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for, as Virgil saith, It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.

Francis Bacon

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Anita Brookner

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

Cormac McCarthy

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt; helpless, naked, piping loud, like a fiend hid in a cloud.

William Blake

Time is the school in which we learn, time is the fire in which we burn.

Delmore Schwartz

It is necessary to relax your muscles when you can. Relaxing your brain is fatal.

Stirling Moss

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. p. 130.

Bertrand Russell

I still have a spiritual base and a spiritual foundation. And my conversation with God is very open-ended. I pray for humility, honestly, because it's very easy to be caught up in this world.

Katy Perry