He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

The beginning is always today.

Mary Wollstonecraft

The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.

Douglas William Jerrold

To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task.

Hermann Hesse

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

H. L. Mencken

Say something in Mandarin, said Tessa, with a smile.Jem said something that sounded like a lot of breathy vowels andconsonants run together, his voice rising and falling melodically: Nihen piao liang.What did you say? Tessa was curious.I said your hair is coming undone here, he said, and reached outand tucked an escaping curl back behind her ear. Tessa felt the bloodspill hot up into her face, and was glad for the dimness of thecarriage. You have to be careful with it, he said, taking his handback, slowly, his fingers lingering against her cheek.

Cassandra Clare

No thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man.

Woodrow Wilson

Birthday calls death close.

Abhinandan Kumar

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.

Richard Dawkins

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

Francis Bacon

The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.

Yoko Ono

Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

Joyce Carol Oates

The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in sand.

Nadine Gordimer