It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Mark Haddon

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.

Ernest Becker

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

June Jordan

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.

Alain Badiou

I wrote a poem to the moon But no one noticed it;Although I hoped that late or soonSomeone would praise a bitIts purity and grace forlone,Its beauty tulip-cool...But as my poem died still-born,I felt a fool.I wrote a verse of vulgar trendSpiced with an oath or two;I tacked a snapper at the endAnd called it Dan McGrew.I spouted it to bar-room boys,Full fifty years away;Yet still with rude and ribald noiseIt lives today.'Tis bitter truth, but there you are-That's how a name is made;Write of a rose, a lark, a star,You'll never make the grade.But write of gutter and of grime,Of pimp and prostitute,The multitude will read your rhyme,And pay to boot.So what's the use to burn and bleedAnd strive for beauty's sake?No one your poetry will read,Your heart will only break.But set your song in vulgar pitch,If rhyme you will not rue,And make your heroine a bitch...Like Lady Lou.

Robert William Service, My Cross

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Alexander received more bravery of mind by the pattern of Achilles, than by hearing the definition of fortitude.

Sir Philip Sidney

I was wasting my time, praying for love.For a love that never comes, from someone who does not exist.

Morrissey

When much dispute has past, we find our tenets just the same as last.

Alexander Pope

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

George Bernard Shaw

I think that, as with marriage, you just know when it's time to have kids.

Ashley Judd