Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.

Henry Adams, The Education of He

Ocean: A body of water occupying about twothirds of a world made for man who has no gills.

Ambrose Bierce

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Simon Schama

Finish what you start, no matter how painful it may be.

Nastia Liukin

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

George Bernard Shaw

I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.

Harriet Tubman

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

Ian McEwan, A Move Abroad, prefa

If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?

John Adams

Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

Thomas Jefferson

Children, for whom suburban life was supposed to make wholesome little Johns and Wendys, became the acid-dropping, classroom-burning hippies of the 1960s.

Ronald Steel

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally being lived. They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates and society.

Stephen Covey

When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It's very simple.

Paulo Coelho