I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing, and business, and playing the piano and so on.

The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behooves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c'est l homme, what is likely to happen if l homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?

Dame Ethel Smyth

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Henry James

You cannot travel within and stand still without.

James Lane Allen

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

Alfred North Whitehead

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home?

Jodi Picoult

I think the presidency is an institution over which you have temporary custody.

Ronald Reagan

The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

Elizabeth Drew

I would never have done what I'd done if I'd considered my father as somebody I wanted to please.

Robert Mapplethorpe

'Hello my name is the Republican Party and I got a problem. I'm addicted to spending and big government.' I'd like one of them just to stand up and say that.

Glenn Beck

Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!

John Keats

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hath cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!

Sir Walter Raleigh

Personal faith can be a powerful force for public good.

David E. Price