Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

Dreams seem to have a will of their own.

Henry Reed

It's received wisdom that the English are uniquely child-unfriendly.

Julie Burchill

Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead.

Augustus Y. Napier

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor we do not remember him in it.

Igor Stravinsky

Men are motivated and empowered when they feel needed. Women are motivated and empowered when they feel cherished.

John Gray

While there is nothing wrong with physical desire per se, and wanting a partner who you consider to be physically attractive, you should also understand that if you are serious about finding that special someone and perhaps growing old with them, looks fade but character does not.

Stephen Richards

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There's an absolute prejudice that good movies are dramas and comedies are more dismissable. But I couldn't disagree more.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

Dan Simmons

You know, sex is actually not so original as the way people love or the stories behind each relationship, which is what you remember. Sex is sex in the end.

Jane Campion

My beloved Mom and Pop always rated tops with each other, and that's the way it will always be.

Ethel Merman