Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journy of exploration and discovery.

Both my parents are English and came out to Australia in 1967. I was born the following year. My parents, and immigrants like them, were known as '&pound10 poms.' Back then, the Australian government was trying to get educated British people and Canadians - to be honest, educated white people - to come and live in Australia.

Hugh Jackman

Despite how entertaining certain stories were, at the bottom of every item of gossip there was someone getting hurt.

Sherwood Smith

Just coffee. Black-like my soul.

Cassandra Clare

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

George Eliot

There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

I stopped thinking too much about what could happen and relied on my physical and mental strength to play the right shots at the right time.

Novak Djokovic

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Christopher Morley

There's many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but it is all hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

One woman who managed to corner him, the story runs, said in a treacly gushing voice:Doesnt it thrill you, Mr. Churchill, to know that every time you make a speech the hall is packed to overflowing?It is quite flattering, Mr. Churchill replied, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that if instead of making a political speech I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.

Sir Winston Churchill

Mike Watt and I had the same teacher. Mr. Tanaka.

Krist Novoselic

It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

William Shakespeare