If our education had included training to bear unpleasantness and to let the first shock pass until we could think more calmly, many an unbearable situation would become manageable, and many a nervous illness avoided. There is proverb expressing this. It says, trouble is a tunnel thorough which we pass and not a brick wall against which we must break our head.

Identity is a bag and a gag. Yet it exists for me with all the force of a fatal disease. Obviously I am here, a mind and a body. To say there's no proof my body exists would be arty and specious and if my mind is more ephemeral, less provable, the solution of being a writer with solid (touchable, tearable, burnable) books is as close as anyone has come to a perfect answer.

Judith Rossner

Only the most unapologetic biblical fundamentalists, for instance, take every biblical injunction literally. If we all took all scripture at the same level of authority, then we would be more open to slavery, to the subjugation of women, to wider use of stoning. Jesus himself spoke out frequently against divorce in the strongest of terms.

Jon Meacham

A well begun is half ended.

Plato

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same -- and most mothers kiss and scold together.

Pearl Buck

My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass.But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do.

John Updike

We live in an image society. Speeches are not what anybody cares about what they care about is the picture.

Madeleine Albright

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Aphra Behn

Whatever separates you from the Truth, throw it away, it will vanish anyhow.

Yumus Emre

The formula for success is Cosmic Ordering, the formula for failure is worry.

Stephen Richards

I feel like you don't know if someone's equipped for a romantic relationship until they're out of their twenties.

Lena Dunham

A man that does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good.

Henry Ward Beecher

That the public can grow accustomed to any face is proved by the increasing prevalence of Keith's ruined physiognomy on TV documentaries and chat shows, as familiar and homely a horror as Grandpa in The Munsters.

Philip Norman