What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

When resources are degraded, we start competing for them, whether it is at the local level in Kenya, where we had tribal clashes over land and water, or at the global level, where we are fighting over water, oil, and minerals. So one way to promote peace is to promote sustainable management and equitable distribution of resources.

Wangari Maathai

Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them. (Book V.).

George Eliot

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

Samuel Johnson

I've always been sort of addicted to genre-jumping. I've never been in the mood to do the same thing I did last time. Hence, me going from 'Big Love' to romantic comedy, to period film... I can't sit still.

Ginnifer Goodwin

Convent. A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.

Ambrose Bierce

Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

Robert Hewison

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.

Albert Einstein

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

George Eliot

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.

Roddy Doyle

With thy coming Melody was come. This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow, And that immeasurable life to know From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead, A seed primeval that has forests bred.

George Eliot