For in the end it is Middle-Earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkien's considerable gifts in showing it to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

It comes down to the way you treat people. When you treat people with dignity and respect all the time, you can work through anything.

John Bacon

...[F]ireworks had for her a direct and magical appeal. Their attraction was more complex than that of any other form of art. They had pattern and sequence, colour and sound, brilliance and mobility; they had suspense, surprise, and a faint hint of danger; above all, they had the supreme quality of transience, which puts the keenest edge on beauty and makes it touch some spring in the heart which more enduring excellences cannot reach.

Jan Struther

No matter how deep in disgrace, a human being IS human, after all.

Sayo Masuda

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Diane Ackerman

Today we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation's promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

George W. Bush

The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.

Luther Burbank

If one asks the whence derives the authority of fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence.

Albert Einstein

One more thing...

Steve Jobs

Fashion is the most intense expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same as acquiring value.... If the purchase of a new garment coincides with the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than he or she needs.

Stephen Bayley

Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness.

Anatole France

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

Mahatma Gandhi

I confess, I do not believe in time.

Vladimir Nabokov