But I'm trying not to be cynical - I don't want to be one of those people who has a cool opportunity and blows it. It's really amazing what's happening to me.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

Paul Muldoon

Insurance: An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

Ambrose Bierce

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

E. O. Wilson

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

Karen Armstrong

It's funny - if you impersonate somebody, they have no idea it's them.

Tracey Ullman

The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a gingerbread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame, by all these attitudes and exertions --an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Chinua Achebe

No conquest can ever become permanent which does not show itself beneficial to the conquered as well as to the conquerors.

Thomas Carlyle

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

Alice James

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Virginia Woolf

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself -- on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life...

Simone de Beauvoir

I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence