I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A flower falls, even though we love it and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

Dogen

Why indeed must God be a noun? Why not a verb -- the most active and dynamic of all.

Mary Daly

In Nevada, for a time, the lawyer, the editor, the banker, the chief desperado, the chief gambler, and the saloon-keeper occupied the same level of society, and it was the highest.

Mark Twain, Roughing It, 1872

I believe that a child going without an education is a crime.

Kamala Harris

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.

George Orwell

James, you are all the family I have. I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years. I owe you everything, and if you cannot believe I have empathy, perhaps you might at least believe I know honor--honor, and debt--

Cassandra Clare

I am beginning to see that all my troubles have their root in a habitual and absolute dependence upon my personal prestige, security, and romantic attachment. When these things go wrong, there is depression. Now this absolute dependence upon people and situations for emotional security is, I think, the immense and devastating fallacy that makes us miserable. This craving for such dependencies, this utter dependence upon people and situations, can only lead to conflict. Both on the surface and at depth. We are making demands on circumstances and people that are bound to fail us. The only safe and sure channel of absolute dependence is upon God himself.

Bill Wilson, Letter, April, 1953

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts.

Rita Mae Brown

I am monarch of all I survey,

William Cowper, The Solitude of

The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.

Halldór Laxness