Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit

He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..

Henry James, The Ambassadors, 19

So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it's a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people.

Camryn Manheim

What we need are not prohibitory marriage laws, but a reformed society, an educated public opinion which will teach individual duty in these matters.

Alfred Russel Wallace

Let us be silent, that we may hear the whisper of God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm addicted to laughing. I go to see a lot of comedy shows. I'm addicted to playing really loud and obnoxious rock music in my car. I'm addicted to beautiful clothes and shoes. I just love gorgeous stuff and work hard to acquire pretty things, shiny things. I'm addicted to shiny things!

Nadia Giosia

Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.

Ernest Hemingway

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

Francis of Assisi

When we want to know God's will, there are three things which always concur: the inward impulse, the Word of God and the trend of circumstances. Never act until these three things agree.

F. B. Meyer

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

George Santayana

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Ernest Hemingway

The beauty of having a producer is that you have someone who says, You're finished.

Sheryl Crow

But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of great difficulty, may be inferred from the imperfect state in which the Science is now found after it has been so long and so intensely studied.

Nassau William Senior