I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print, but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can hardly accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

Christopher Morley

The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

They condemn what they do not understand.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

Tom Robbins

If only, I thought, I could talk to Eugene just one more time. This was before I came to understand that you cannot make someone fall in love with you But here's what you can do. By arguing and pleading and screaming and crying and throwing plates and phoning a lot and bringing hot food and sending flowers and buying gifts and doing unsolicited favors and remembering a birthday and being nice and declaring your abiding love and trying hard or sometimes merely by being present, you can make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you.

Patricia Marx

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years it was a splendid laugh!

Charles Dickens

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas -- uncertainty, progress, change -- into crimes.

Salman Rushdie

Seek always to do some good, somewhere. Every man has to seek in his own way to realize his true worth.You must give some time to your fellow man. Even if it's a little thing; do something for those who have need of a man's help, something for which you get no pay but privilege of doing it. For remember, you don't live in a world all your own. Your brothers live here, too.

Albert Schweitzer

Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It's a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.

Henry Miller

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

Boris Pasternak

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Philip Larkin

If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry.

Anton Chekhov