The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.

A moment later I heard my sweetheart running up the stairs. My heart expanded with such force that it almost blotted me out. I hitched up the pants of my pajamas, flung the door open: and simultaneously Lolita arrived, in her Sunday frock, stamping, panting, and the she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws, my palpitating darling!

Vladimir Nabokov

I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices, and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jerry Saltz

A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.

Mason Cooley

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Ellen Key

I don't jog, if I die I want to be sick.

Abe Lemons

How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face

William Shakespeare

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

Bill James

Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.

Donna Leon

The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

Stephen Covey

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

Abraham Lincoln

So one reason the science educators panic at the first sign of public rebellion is that they fear exposure of the implicit religious content in what they are teaching.

Phillip E. Johnson