When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe.

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.

Abraham Lincoln

My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them??by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.

Jane Austen

Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.

Erica Jong

Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.

William S. Burroughs

The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.

Francis Bacon

In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.

Marianne Williamson

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

Clarence Darrow

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

George Orwell

My book collection is primarily in America, since that's where I've lived most of my life.

Terri Windling

Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.

Jane Austen

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Virginia Woolf

Friendships are fragile things and require as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious thing.

Randolph Silliman Bourne