The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier.

Margaret Young

One also hears a great deal about how this awful joint tenure of the executive mansion was a good thing in that it conferred 'experience' on the despised and much-deceived wife. Well, the main 'experience' involved the comprehensive fouling-up of the nation's health-care arrangements, so as to make them considerably worse than they had been before and to create an opening for the worst-of-all-worlds option of the so-called HMO, combining as it did the maximum of capitalist gouging with the maximum of socialistic bureaucracy. This abysmal outcome, forgiven for no reason that I can perceive, was the individual responsibility of the woman who now seems to think it entitles her to the presidency.

Christopher Hitchens

Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Oscar Wilde

if you just go on dreaming then it stays a dream and becomes stale and dead. But first to dream and then to do isn't that the way to make a dream come true

Meindert DeJong

They were using the dolls to project their dreams of their own futures as adult women.

Ruth Handler

Constant togetherness is fine -- but only for Siamese twins.

Victoria Billings

A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.

Colin Powell

Jesus didn't say, 'Blessed are those who care for the poor.' He said, 'Blessed are we where we are poor, where we are broken.' It is there that God loves us deeply and pulls us into deeper communion with himself.

Henri Nouwen

If by our sacrifice - yours and mine,' said Onos T'oolan, 'the pain of one life can be ended; if, by our deaths, this one can be guided home... we will judge this a worthy cause.

Steven Erikson

But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

Tom Waits

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of Solitaire. It is a grand passion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Playing music has always felt very natural. You know, you do try to do other things, and you do learn lessons that way, but, eventually - well... if your dad is a plumber, you become a plumber. It's the family business, and I felt like I was taking over the family business.

Dhani Harrison