Force never moves in a straight line, but always in a curve vast as the universe, and therefore eventually returns whence it issued forth, but upon a higher arc, for the universe has progressed since it started.

Every parent is at some time the father of the unreturned prodigal, with nothing to do but keep his house open to hope.

John Ciardi

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

Alice Walker

With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception... they are overcome by belief in themselves. It is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness

Jocelyn Murray

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Wallace Stevens

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalber

May God be with me! May Heaven bless this New Year. May it be a year of fruitfulness, of peace and prosperity; may it be a year of peace and unity for all mankind; may the world be freed of cholera.

Giacomo Meyerbeer

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

Jane Austen, The narrator, in No

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

Samuel Johnson, Letter to Bennet

If you can see it, you can achieve it. God helps those who helps themselves. Power is in the act of humility.

Patricia Amis

I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.

Dean Koontz

I make myself rich by making my wants few.

Henry David Thoreau