There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum.

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top -- or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things. Life is one crisis after another.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

Jose Saramago

Success and the art of making music are two different things for me.

Norah Jones

Some guys travel with expensive Louis Vuitton luggage but it gets all scratched up under the plane. I'd rather not spend too much money on something that's just going to get messed up.

James Harden

Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty.

Marjorie Boulton

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Chinua Achebe

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

Alexander Pope

It is wisdom to recognize necessity when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.

J.R.R. Tolkien

The rich are different. Their wants are very high maintenance. They'll pick eye color and hair color, all the way down to what she does for a living, what school she went to. Their list can be extremely long. But at the end of the day, dating is dating, because they're human beings.

Patti Stanger

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.

Anita Roddick

Never hesitate to steal a good idea.

Al Neuharth

Look to this day For it is life, the very life of life. For yesterday is but a dream And tomorrow is only a vision But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness And tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day Such is the salutation of the dawn.

Kalidasa