Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.

Victor Hugo

Vielleicht gibt es ja gar keine tollen, wunderbaren Menschen. Und wir reden es uns für eine kurze Weile nur ein, dass der oder der toll und wunderbar ist, damit wir einen Grund haben, uns in ihn zu verlieben. Sozusagen ein Alibi für die Liebe.

Brigitte Blobel

Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.

John Dewey

I go to the gym five days a week and I have a personal trainer. I am on a strict diet, which is kind of hard to keep up with on the road, but I stick to it as well as I can.

Lou Gramm

We need to distinguish between nostalgia and the reassuring memory of happy times, which serves to link the present to the past and to provide a sense of continuity. The emotional appeal of happy memories does not depend on disparagement of the present, the hallmark of the nostalgic attitude. Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging. Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer.

Christopher Lasch

To the right, books; to the left, a tea-cup. In front of me, the fireplace; behind me, the post. There is no greater happiness than this.

Teiga

For me, habit is just a synonym for death.

Juliette Binoche

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.

T.S. Eliot

I'm someone who's done the opposite of whatever the received wisdom is, to keep your career going into your 50s.

Elizabeth McGovern

Things will change: you won't feel this way forever. And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most.

Kelly Cutrone

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

Albert Einstein

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak and at last some crisis shows what we have become.

Brooke Foss Westcott