At home I've got a very puerile, juvenile sense of humour.

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul and you answer.

Terri Guillemets

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

Robert Frost

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time

Virginia Woolf

They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn't solve anything and didn't save anyone even a little bit? What then?

Paula McLain

The suburban housewife -- she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife -- freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment.

Betty Friedan

For many years, it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months, travel the world, through coups d'etat, assassinations, famines, massacres and tsunamis, and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.

Jo Nesbo

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

David Bailey

False friendship, like the ivy, decays and ruins the walls it embraces but true friendship gives new life and animation to the object it supports.

Richard Burton

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Terry Eagleton

From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,There's nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends.

Hilaire Belloc, Dedicatory Ode S

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

Samuel Butler

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

Christopher Hitchens