Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

William Trevor

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

Oscar Wilde

Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Christopher Hitchens

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

Karl Rove

Once he makes up his mind, he's full of indecision. On Dwight D. Eisenhower

Oscar Levant

Our songs touch people, and take them back to a time when there was no threat of terrorism, when you didn't have to lock your doors and when Mom and Dad took care of everything.

George Grove

The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf

We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilization.

Anthony Burgess

I am saddened by how people treat one another and how we are so shut off from one another and how we judge one another, when the truth is, we are all one connected thing. We are all from the same exact molecules.

Ellen DeGeneres

Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts and his higher nature -- and another woman to help him forget them.

Helen Rowland

I'm sure I am impatient sometimes. I sure do get angry sometimes. I think it's outrageous how hard it is to get this country to feed its children and to take care of its children, to give them a decent education.

Marian Wright Edelman