I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master.http://www.barnard.edu/amstud/resources/strenuous/trletter.htm

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Carson McCullers

I'm not going to limit myself just because people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.

Dolly Parton

Enjoy the journey and try to get better every day. And don't lose the passion and the love for what you do.

Nadia Comaneci

No thyng ys to man so dere As wommanys love yn gode manere. A gode womman is mannys blys.

Robert Mannyng

You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link. This is but half the truth. You are also as strong as your strongest link. To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam. To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.

Kahlil Gibran

And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. someone may say. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

Stephen King

It is better to be looked over than overlooked.

Mae West

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

Neil Gaiman

Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for it.

Earl Warren

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

Doris Lessing

Wise people say nothing in dangerous times.

John Selden

I cannot think of any character below the flatterer, except he who envies him.

Sir Richard Steele