During the holiday season, it's easy to forget that sometimes the best gift of all is simply the gift of time. I can't think of anything a writer would appreciate more than being given time and space to work.

A friend may be nature's most magnificent creation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.

Red Auerbach

When I joined Bill Clinton's start-up presidential campaign in 1991, I was confident that women would play an ever more important role, but I never gave a minute's thought to what would happen if we won. When we did - and I became the first woman to serve as White House press secretary - it changed my life. But it didn't change the world.

Dee Dee Myers

I believe that the majority of times the scale tilts toward the good. It's this amazing thing that rolls on and if we get in the flow of it, that's God. And if we fight it, if we swim the other way, we're swimming away from the purest expression of this life.

Michael J. Fox

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

Nicholas Negroponte

For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especially during youth.

Honore de Balzac

Women have talent and intelligence but, due to social constraints and prejudices, it is still a long distance away from the goal of gender equality.

Pratibha Patil

Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.(translated 1951)

Emile Durkheim, Suicide, bk. 3,

God's love for his people is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.

Pope Benedict XVI

When the soul is naughted and transformed, then of herself she neither works nor speaks nor wills, nor feels nor hears nor understands; neither has she of herself the feeling of outward or inward, where she may move. And in all things it is God who rules and guides her, without the meditation of any creature.... And she is so full of peace that thought she pressed her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing come forth from them than peace.

St. Catherine of Genoa

Football taught me how hard you had to work to achieve something.

Kenny Chesney

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Walt Whitman