Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there, still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen.

Once in royal David's city Stood a lowly cattle shed,Where a Mother laid her BabyIn a manger for His bed:Mary was that Mother mild,Jesus Christ her little Child.

Cecil Frances Alexander, Once in

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

Matthew Arnold

Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.

Christopher Hitchens

All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you. Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. What? he said. That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.

Mitch Albom

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

Tom Stoppard

People want change but not too much change. Finding that balance is tricky for every politician.

Eleanor Clift

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

Arthur C. Clarke

The secret to getting ahead is getting started.

Mark Twain

If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women's fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity.

Virginia Woolf

We're learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they're broken. We're also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings - stepsiblings, half-siblings - and the surprising power they can have.

Jeffrey Kluger

You can never be too rich or too thin.

Wallis Simpson

As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.

John Green