When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there.

Some people seem to understand this - that life and change take time - but I am not one of those people.

Anne Lamott

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in , for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since , but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.

Christopher Hitchens

My father was the quintessential husband and dad.

Sidney Poitier

Your God is ever beside you - indeed, He is even within you.

Alphonsus Liguori

Whatever is beautiful is beautiful by necessity.

Pindar

Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.

Samuel Johnson

Friendship, 'the wine of life,' said Boswell, should, like a well-stocked cellar, be thus continually renewed. And Dr. Johnson added to this A man, Sir, should keep his friendships in constant repair.

Samuel Johnson

Like all best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

Queen Elizabeth II

It saddens me beyond my tears that love is lost within the fears.

Lynn C. Tolson

A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

Joey Adams

The criterion of true beauty is that it increases on examination; if false, that it lessens. There is therefore, something in true beauty that corresponds with right reason, and is not the mere creation of fancy.

Lord Greville

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)