I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poe

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do want society.

Henry David Thoreau

Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty.

Holly Black

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.

Albert Schweitzer

If you start using a medication in a person with autism, you should see an obvious improvement in behavior in a short period of time. If you do not see an obvious improvement, they probably should not be taking the stuff. It is that simple.

Temple Grandin

Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream --and yet God blesses it!

Georges Bernanos

Years ago women of my size were considered royalty.

Camryn Manheim

If you wish to know the road up the mountain, ask the man who goes back and forth on it.

Zenrin

McLaggen makes Grawp look like a gentleman.

J.K. Rowling

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

Virginia Woolf

When the printing press was developed in the fifteenth century it was said that printed books would make reading and writing the infatuation of people who have no business reading and writing.

James Burke, The Knowledge Web,

Seeing the family is a very important part of my weekend.

Susannah York