As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky. So up to the house-top the coursers they flew, with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

Anthony Doerr

Work saves us from three great evils boredom, vice and need.

Voltaire

Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.

Ann Patchett

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? is not this also a return?

Epictetus

Newborns are always beautiful. They can’t fail to make the heart sing, for even the plainest faces are alive with promise. But I’ve always seen beauty in old age too. Light shines through the bone, exquisite even as it flickers and flutters and dims toward the end.

Jenny Lee

A fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly shot off

William Shakespeare

Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

Eric Hoffer

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

Lawrence Durrell

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Edmund Burke

I'm not a very serious person. You know how they say that clowns are very funny in public and are really sad at home? I'm really kind of stupid at home and more serious in public.

Roland Joffe

Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire first.

Reggie Leach

It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

Douglas Adams, The Original Hitc