My family, although they're very large on both my parents' sides, they don't know much about their family tree. Occasionally, they try to dig, but they can't get very far, and it's baffling. In Dublin, it seems that so many public records were wiped out it's proven to be very difficult, so I know very little.

Women of quality are so civil, you can hardly distinguish love from good breeding.

William Wycherley

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chance generally favors the prudent.

Joseph Joubert

We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. (on atomic energy)

Albert Einstein

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

Neil Gaiman

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture,

Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.

Plato

I talk to myself because I like dealing with a better class of people.

Savielly Tartakower

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep.

Virginia Woolf

What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistant Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate).

Terry Pratchett

You couldn't say 'I had orders.' You couldn't say 'It's not fair.' No one was listening. There were no Words. You owned yourself. [...] Not 'Thou Shalt Not'. Say 'I Will Not'.

Terry Pratchett