It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

Perhaps I am still very much of an American. That is to say, na?ve, optimistic, gullible. In the eyes of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in superabundance, a believer in miracles.

Henry Miller

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and in-human to impose the Jews on the Arabs.

Mahatma Gandhi

Whenever I get fed up with life I love to go wandering in nature.

Andrea Arnold

If I be the first of us to die,Let grief not blacken long your sky.Be bold yet modest in your grieving.There is a change but not a leaving.For just as death is part of life,The dead live on forever in the living.And all the gathered riches of our journey,The moments shared, the mysteries explored,The steady layering of intimacy stored,The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,The wordless language of look and touch,The knowing,Each giving and each taking,These are not flowers that fade,Nor trees that fall and crumble,Nor are they stone,For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstandAnd mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.What we were, we are.What we had, we have.A conjoined past imperishably present.So when you walk the wood where once we walkedtogetherAnd scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,Be still.Close your eyes.Breathe.Listen for my footfall in your heart.I am not gone but merely walk within you.

Nicholas Evans, from The Smoke J

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

C.S. Lewis

We are all cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Ray Bradbury

Most women set out to try to change a man, and when they have changed him they do not like him.

Marlene Dietrich

But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.

Bono

They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.

John Ruskin

He who hasn't hacked assemply language as a youth has no heart. He who does as an adult has no brain.

John Moore

Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Most of us have a soundtrack running in the background of our lives. I access that soundtrack when I write.

Robin M. Helm