What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between...this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -- which is really the realm of the artist.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.These laid the world away; poured out the redSweet wine of youth; gave up the years to beOf work and joy, and that unhoped serene,That men call age; and those who would have been,Their sons, they gave, their immortality.Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,And paid his subjects with a royal wage;And Nobleness walks in our ways again;And we have come into our heritage.

Rupert Brooke, The Dead

Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!

Abraham Cowley

However much we guard ourselves against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us. It is not so much the example of others we imitate, as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

Eric Hoffer

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Jean Cocteau

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin.

John Philpot Curran

Suffering occurs when we want other people to love us in the way we imagine we want to be loved, and not in the way that love should manifest itself--free and untrammeled, guiding us with its force and driving us on.

Paulo Coelho

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.

M. Scott Peck

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Matthew Arnold

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

Thomas Jefferson

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

John le Carre

Ah, said Magnus. Nerd love. It is a beautiful thing, while also being an object of mockery and hilarity for those of us who are more sophisticated.

Cassandra Clare