My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories - not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father's generation. It's a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.

Pietro Aretino

Congratulations is the civility of envy.

Ambrose Bierce

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.

John Green

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of curse it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

C.S. Lewis

He who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

Source Unknown

Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.

Mark Twain

It is better to tell the truth and face the punishment, than to lie and face the consequences.

Anthony Liccione

To be a person is to have a story to tell.

Isak Dinesen

Ideas are these disembodied life forms, they don’t have a form, but they have a will. All they want is to be made manifest. If you can manage to open up your consciousness to an idea of living in a world of abundance, then you can believe that, constantly, ideas are trying to find human collaborators.

Elizabeth Gilbert

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

People ask me to smile for the camera, but somehow it always comes out gloomy.

Stephen Rea