To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations.

It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.

Mark Twain

I don't think nationalism is alone holding the field it's in contention with a lot of different things.

Peter Singer

The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.

Alice Meynell

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

Thomas Hobbes

Children are excellent observers, and will often perceive your slightest defects. In general, those who govern children, forgive nothing in them, but everything in themselves.

Francois Fenelon

I'm an artist, and I go in the studio and make my music. And then I'll give it to my dad and he does what he does. And he does, you know, the press, and figuring out shows and whatnot. When it comes to my artistic freedom, he doesn't, like, step on my toes or anything.

Ashlee Simpson

Politics is a lot of serendipity. You're in the right place and the right time and you've got the right message, and it either connects for you or, or it doesn't.

Jon Huntsman, Jr.

We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges.

Albert Camus

It was tough at the time but when I was younger, my Dad. I would say my Dad, because without him I wouldn't have been here. I mean it was tough for me because he was really demanding. With him, it was never enough, you know, anything I did was never enough.

Thierry Henry

The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.

Alexandra Fuller

We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the old metaphor: You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.

Jane Fonda

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

A. N. Wilson