A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

The creator is both detached and committed, free and yet ensnared, concerned but not too much so. If motivation is too strong the person is blinded; if the objective situation is too tightly structured, the person sees none of its alternative possibilities.

Robert Macleod

and when love came to us twice and lied to us twice we decided to never love again that was fair fair to us and fair to love itself. we ask for no mercy or no miracles; we are strong enough to live and to die and to kill flies, attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack, live on luck and skill, get alone, get alone often, and if you can't sleep alone be careful of the words you speak in your sleep; and ask for no mercy no miracles; and don't forget: time is meant to be wasted, love failsand death is useless.

Charles Bukowski

I had a cat once, but every time I tried to give him a bath, the fur stuck to my tongue.

Murdock

I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand.

Wendell Berry

In great matters men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small matters, as they are.

Gamaliel Bradford

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

John Dos Passos

One might say, for example, that a patient has a kind of St Vitus's dance; a kind of dropsy; a kind of nerve fever; a kind of ague. One would never say, however (to end once and for all the confusion of these names) He has St. Vitus's dance, He has nerve fever, He has dropsy, He has ague, since there simply are not any fixed, unchanging diseases to be known by such names.

Samuel Hahnemann

On the occasions when I have pondered over men's various activities, the dangers and worries they are exposed to at court or at war, from which so many quarrels, passions, risky, often ill-conceived actions and so on are born, I have often said that man's unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room. A man wealthy enough for life's needs would never leave home to go to sea or beseige some fortress if he knew how to stay at home and enjoy it...

Blaise Pascal, Pense

You are the reason I don't want to die all the time.

Henry Rollins

Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.

Natalie Goldberg

Women are the victims of this patriarchal culture, but they are also its carriers. Let us keep in mind that every oppressive man was raised in the confines of his mother's home.

Shirin Ebadi

I know there are people who don't like their audience or like the experience of being recognized or celebrated, but my audience has been very good - they don't bother me and when they do contact me it's usually on the nicest possible terms.

James Taylor