I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness.

Maurice Sendak

The fate of the country... does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

Henry David Thoreau

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Charlotte Bronte

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

Samuel Johnson

Secrecy is the chastity of friendship.

Jeremy Taylor

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Virginia Woolf

I have not observed men's honesty to increase with their riches.

Thomas Jefferson

To disbelieve is easy to scoff is simple to have faith is harder.

Louis L'Amour

For I say unto you in all sadness of conviction that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone -- when you have felt around you are a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and despair have trusted to your own unshaken will -- then only can you gain the secret isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten men who have never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought -- the subtle rapture of postponed power, which the world knows not because it has no external trappings, but which to his prophetic vision is more real than that which commands an army. And if this joy should not be yours, still it is only thus you can know that you have done what lay in you to do -- can say that you have lived, and be ready for the end.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived.

J.K. Rowling

Take a dollar from a thousand and it will be a thousand no more.

Oliver Goldsmith

There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

Samuel Johnson