I've been perfectly happily married for 25 years, and have a nice life. Inane things don't interest me.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Mark Twain

Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a part of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.

Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

If you haven't turned rebel by twenty you've got no heart if you haven't turned establishment by thirty you've got no brains!

Kevin Spacey

I believe people are in our lives for a reason. We're here to learn from each other.

Gillian Anderson

None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives.

Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of L

As she came up to the arch Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone.She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillas identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them.'Who are these, these ...?; She gestured with her hand.''These?' The man with the brush sounded surprised. 'The lost.''Men who died in battle?''No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in cemetries.''These are just the ... unfound?'She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes.When she could speak again, she said, 'from the whole war?'The man shook his head. 'Just these fields.' He gestured with his arm.Elizabeth went and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight.'Nobody told me.' She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. 'My God, nobody told me.

Sebastian Faulks, 'Birdsong' p.

Doing the tough things sets winners apart from losers.

Stephen Richards

The plan shows that the twenty million people in the German democratic Republic and in the democratic sector of Berlin think only of peace, and that they are working for freedom and peaceful prosperity.

Walter Ulbricht

Faded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably

John Keats

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Russell Hoban

I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.

Terry Prachett

Never swap horses crossing a stream.

Proverb