The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.

Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon, 182

Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.

Greil Marcus

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoug

Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.This text appeared in the Seattle Sunday Star on Oct. 29, 1887, in a column by Dr. Henry A. Smith. Smith took notes as Seattle spoke and created this text in English from those notes.

Chief Seattle, text of Chief Sea

It's absolutely stupid that we live without an ozone layer. We have men, we've got rockets, we've got saran wrap - fix it!

Lewis Black

I love the Grammy nominations this year. Anybody who really loves what they do got rewarded for it. It's not a death match between Ray Charles and Jessica Simpson.

John Mayer

The self-image is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.

Maxwell Maltz

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Eugenio Montale

Comment l'Histoire pourrait-elle mieux servir la vie qu'en attachant ? leur patrie et aux coutumes de leur patrie les races et les peuples moins favorisés, en leur donnant des goûts sédentaires, ce qui les empêche de chercher mieux ? l'étranger, de rivaliser dans la lutte pour parvenir ? ce mieux? Parfois cela paraît être de l'entêtement et de la déraison qui visse en quelque sorte l'individu ? tels compagnons et ? tel entourage, ? telles habitudes laborieuses, ? tels stérile coteau. Mais c'est la déraison la plus salutaire, celle qui profite le plus ? la collectivité. Chacun le sait, qui s'est rendu compte des terribles effets de l'esprit d'aventure, de la fièvre d'émigration, quand ils s'emparent de peuplades entières, chacun le sait, qui a vu de près un peuple ayant perdu la fidélité ? son passé, abandonné ? une chasse fiévreuse de la nouveauté, ? une recherche perpétuelle des éléments étrangers. Le sentiment contraire, le plaisir que l'arbre prend ? ses racines, le bonheur que l'on éprouve ? ne pas se sentir né de l'arbitraire et du hasard, mais sorti d'un passé héritier, floraison, fruit , ce qui excuserait et justifierait même l'existence : c'est l? ce que l'on appelle aujourd'hui, avec une certaine prédilection, le sens historique.Deuxième Considération intempestive. ch. 3

Friedrich Nietzsche

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Thomas Carlyle

All ideas come from sensation or reflection.--Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from Experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation, employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning

Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.

Paul Theroux