But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Once I traveled about in an old bakery wagon, double-doored rattler with a mattress on the floor, I stopped where people stopped or gathered, I listened and looked and felt, and in the process had a picture of my country the accuracy of which was impaired only by my own shortcomings.

John Steinbeck, Travels With Cha

Gratitude is the heart's memory.

Proverb

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false, and the false with the true.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.

Ronald Reagan

He couldn't understand how he was awarded medals and honors for clubbing and bayoneting people, and be called a barbarian for killing seals.

Geoff Butler

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Sp

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

Leo Tolstoy

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

Lewis Mumford

O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry, Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift and die; The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide, Take not thy thunder from us, But take away our pride.

G. K. Chesterton, A Hymn (first

The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.

Swami Vivekananda

I'm not that big a fan of marriage as an institution and I don't know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.

Marisa Tomei

Few among men are they who cross to the further shore. The others merely run up and down the bank on this side.

Gautama Buddha