The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

William Godwin

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

Marilyn French

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.

James Barrie, Peter Pan

Lady Jane Gray, who tho' inferior to her lovely Cousin the Queen of Scots, was yet an amiable young woman

Jane Austen

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

Jerry Saltz

I don't believe in prom,' I reminded her as she rounded a corner. I expertly angled my raisin bran to accomodate the g-forces. I'd done this before.

John Green

Pity those who nature abuses; never those who abuse nature.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Convent - a place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the sin of idleness.

Ambrose Bierce

The good thing about a self-help book is that if you misunderstand something then it won't mock you.

Stephen Richards