I feel very proud, even though they didn't elect me, to be President of the Argentines.

Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life adn there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn't adopt chemistry as a religion.

Betty Smith

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Virginia Woolf

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

George Bernard Shaw

What torments my soul is its loneliness. The more it expands among friends and the daily habits or pleasures, the more, it seems to me, it flees me and retires into its fortress. The poet who lives in solitude, but who produces much, is the one who enjoys those treasures we bear in our bosom, but which forsake us when we give ourselves to others. When one yields oneself completely to one's soul, it opens itself to one, and then it is that the capricious thing allows one the greatest of good fortunes... that of sympathizing with others, of studying itself, of painting itself constantly in its works.

Eugene Delacroix

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Believing everyone is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous.

Abraham Lincoln

Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their moneys worth, except for these.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.

Ad Reinhardt

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

Marcel Duchamp

I'll play with it first and tell you what it is later.

Bette Davis

The understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.

Michael Ignatieff

At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Jodi Picoult