He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

People read the papers not in the hopes of learning something new, but in the expectation of being told what they already know. This is a form of living death. Its apotheosis is the daily poll in USA Today, which informs us what percentage of a small number of unscientifically selected people called a toll number to vote on questions that cannot possibly be responded to with a yes or no.

Roger Ebert

There's a long life ahead of you and it's going to be beautiful, as long as you keep loving and hugging each other.

Yoko Ono

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Henry Ward Beecher

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

William Wordsworth, from Preface

I realize that advice is worth what it costs--that is, nothing.

General Douglas MacArthur

How many boys like him were out there in the ether, holding on to their big brothers and sisters who were still alive? How many husbands were floating between life and death, clinging to their wives in this world? And how may millions and millions of people were there in the world like Charlie who wouldn't let go of their loved ones when they're gone?

Ben Sherwood

The most important thing in my father's life? World peace. Me and my brother. My mom.

Sean Lennon

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

Henry James

No one knows very much about the life of another. This ignorance becomes vivid, if you love another. Love sets the imagination on fire, and, also, eventually, chars the imagination into a harder element: imagination cannot match love, cannot plunge so deep, or range so wide.

James Baldwin

You discarded most of the lies along the way but held on to the one that said life mattered.

Stephen King

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

Ernest Gaines

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art - the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard

Anne Rice