Ah, Hope! what would life be, stripped of thy encouraging smiles, that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of today, for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow.

We are chained to this life by a chain of gold, and we dare not sever it for fear of what lies beyond the drop.

Cassandra Clare

I'm so touched that complete strangers will send me a script asking me to be in their film. That still amazes me - and sometimes for a lot of money too.

Liam Neeson

I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is easy is an occupational hazard.

Richard Russo

First of all, I try to be a positive role model.

Bruce Jenner

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

John Updike

Enthusiasms, like stimulants, are often affected by people with small mental ballast.

Minna Antrim

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Jean Paul

Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.

John Yoo

I guess as long as people think of me for different ages, I'll trust their opinion. I remember noticing one year that Michelle Monaghan played 34 and 19, so I've kind of clung to that as my justification that I can be Jake Gyllenhaal's wife and a freshman in college in the same year.

Anna Kendrick

Ray Bradbury is, for many reasons, the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship, Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be, should be, and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible, willing to tolerate and to teach, happy to inspire but also to be inspired.

Greg Bear

Live fast, die old, and make very sure everyone knows you were there.

Alan Cox

The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.

Pope John Paul II