Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.

Orson Scott Card

I love photography. My boyfriend's got a great camera, which I bought for his birthday.

Sarah Sutton

Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.

William Shakespeare

If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It's the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.

Don DeLillo

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.This text appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star on Oct. 29, 1887, in a column by Dr. Henry A. Smith. Smith took notes as Seattle spoke and created this text in English from those notes.

Chief Seattle, text of Chief Sea

A phenomenon often seen. A sceptic adhering to a believer; that is as simple as the law of the complementary colours. What we lack attracts us. Nobody loves the light like the blind man...

Victor Hugo

... the situation was still too delicate for complete candor and the ultimate truth too unformed for statement.

Dean Acheson

A kiss on the beach when there is a full moon is the closest thing to heaven.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

In England every man you meet is some man's son in America, he may be some man's father.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

Patrick J. Kennedy

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.

Napoleon Hill

Bologna is the best city in Italy for food and has the least number of tourists. With its medieval beauty, it has it all.

Mario Batali