Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

It's no shame in reaching second or third base if you aimed for first base.

Stephen Richards

One of those promises was to limit the size of government and to have the government serve the people - and not the other way around.

Scott Walker

Surfing soothes me, it's always been a kind of Zen experience for me. The ocean is so magnificent, peaceful, and awesome. The rest of the world disappears for me when I'm on a wave.

Paul Walker

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

Lao Tzu

One also, in our milieu, simply didn't meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn't poverty. A colleague of my father's had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone ) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. 'I am not a Yankee,' he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). 'I am a CON-federate.' From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I'll call Mr. 'Miller,' a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller's great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out [...]. Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swa

Christopher Hitchens

The first step in a person's salvation is knowledge of their sin.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

Aristotle

For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.

Alexander Pope

Prince used to call me up 3am in the morning and invite me to hear some of his new songs.

Sheena Easton

To control your life, control your mind. To control your mind, control your breath.

Stephen Richards

Beauty is only skin deep. I think what's really important is finding a balance of mind, body and spirit.

Jennifer Lopez

Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

Walter Lippmann