What I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

Otto von Bismarck

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.http://www.thirteen.org/pressroom/release.php?get=1640

F. Scott Fitzgerald, essay: The

I was fired at the pinnacle of my career, on my 39th birthday. And in the year that followed, I learned that there are many psychological phases of being 'let go.'

Mika Brzezinski

A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands, unites in his own person the three different characters, of landlord, farmer, and labourer. His produce, therefore, should pay him the rent of the first, the profit of the second, and the wages of the third.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nation

It's funny, having the same name as someone. Me, Emma Watson and Emma Stone, the amount of times I've been called Emma Watson or Emma Stone is so funny. It's just 'cause we're all named Emma. None of us look alike.

Emma Roberts

History has shown us that, on extraordinarily rare occasions, it becomes necessary for the federal government to intervene on behalf of individuals whose 14th Amendment rights to legal due process and equal protection may be violated by a state.

Michael K. Simpson

You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.

Ethel Barrymore

I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.

James Ellroy

America is a such a melting pot, I'm not sure if roast chicken is the classic comfort food for everybody.

Eric Ripert

In dreams and in love there are no impossibilities.

Janos Arnay

Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying.

Marilyn vos Savant

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Paul De Man