In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided among the sexes.

Slowly he took out the clothes in which, ten years beforem Cosette had left Montfermeil; first the little dress, then the black scarf, then the great heavy child's shoes Cosette could still almost have worn, so small was her foot, then the vest of very thich fustian, then the knitted petticoat, the the apron with pockets, then the wool stockings.... Then his venerable white head fell on the bed, this old stoical heart broke, his face was swallowed up, so to speak, in Cosette's clothes, and anybody who had passed along the staircase at that moment would have heard irrepressible sobbing.

Victor Hugo

The dove loves when it quarrels; the wolf hates when it flatters.

Saint Augustine

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

A. R. Ammons

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

John M. Barrie, The Little Minis

To further the appreciation of culture among all the people, to increase respect for the creative individual, to widen participation by all the processes and fulfillments of artthis is one of the fascinating challenges of these days.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

Richard Dawkins

From sixteen to twenty, all women, kept in humor by their hopes and by their attractions, appear to be good-natured.

Samuel Richardson

You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?

George Bernard Shaw

There's a subterranean impetus towards pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by the sort of half sex that one finds in advertisements.

Norman Mailer

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

Billy West

My mom and I have always been very close. She is my best friend. She had to make a lot of sacrifices early on in my life to make sure I got to do what I wanted to do.

Norah Jones

I think 99 percent of women's lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the social adjustment follows the technology - it doesn't precede it.

Lois McMaster Bujold