My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher.

Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.

Jane Austen

He is nothing more than one of my pawns. However, he is not a normal pawn. He is a pawn that can get across the whole board in one move.

Yana Toboso

All the men in my family were bearded, and most of the women.

W. C. Fields

It is the desire of the good people of the whole country that sectionalism as a factor in our politics should disappear...'

Rutherford B. Hayes

Half my life is an act of revision.

John Irving

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

Soren Kierkegaard

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.

LouisFerdinand Celine

During the holiday season, it's easy to forget that sometimes the best gift of all is simply the gift of time. I can't think of anything a writer would appreciate more than being given time and space to work.

Kate Klise

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

Camille Paglia

I spent a lot of time on farms when I was young. My uncle and my dad owned a big farm.

Emeril Lagasse

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?

Oliver Sacks

I'm very accepting with my age. It's like notches on your belt: experience, wisdom, and a different kind of beauty.

Zoe Saldana