Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

Aristotle

They say you're not supposed to put metal in a microwave oven. They're right.

Steven Wright

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Ben Fountain

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imaginedfuture, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love ora passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convincedthat even the smallest particle of the surrounding world wascharged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, andone would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by thehigh, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, somany and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like firefliesin the perfumed heat of summer night.

Mark Strand

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

Honore de Balzac

Every winner has scars.

Herbert N. Casson

The same passions in man and woman nonetheless differ in tempo; hence man and woman do not cease misunderstanding one another

Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he doesn't become a monster.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Who of us is mature enough for offspring before the offspring themselves arrive? The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

Peter De Vries

When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.

Tea Obreht

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

Ernest Hemingway

Look to the Great Eternal Cause And not to any man, for light. Look in; and learn the wrong, and right, From your own soul's unwritten laws. And when you question, or demur, Let Love be your Interpreter.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox