Color fills her cheeks, and I think it again: that Johanna Reyes might still be beautiful. Except now I think that she isn't just beautiful in spite of the scar, she's somehow beautiful with it, like Lynn with her buzzed hair, like Tobias with the memories of his father's cruelty that he wears like armor, like my mother in her plain gray clothing.

Any problems that may occur have ultimately been caused by you, because you are responsible for where you are and what you are doing there.

Garth Stein

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

Harry Mathews

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Bertrand Russell

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.

James Russell Lowell

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

Henry David Thoreau

The walls are the publishers of the poor.

Eduardo Galeano

When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly.

Patrick Overton

Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

Edward Thomas

I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.

Groucho Marx

A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away.

Gene Roddenberry

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Bertrand Russell