We learned to be patient observers like the owl. We learned cleverness from the crow, and courage from the jay, who will attack an owl ten times its size to drive it off its territory. But above all of them ranked the chickadee because of its indomitable spirit.

by now you've already formed your own impression. you believe that an act committed a lifetime ago defines a man, or you believe that a person's past has nothing to do with his future. you think i am either a hero, or a monster. maybe knowning more about circumstances will make you think differently about me, but it won't change what happened twenty-eight years ago.

Jodi Picoult

I never worry about being driven to drink I just worry about being driven home.

W. C. Fields

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

Mark Twain

My only objection to the custom of giving books as Christmas presents is perhaps the selfish one that it encourages and keeps in the game a number of writers who would be far better employed if they abandoned the pen and took to work.http://wodehouse.ru/tt171201.htm

P. G. [Sir Pelham Grenville] Wod

It's funny, but you get to a time in your life when you think you have all the friends you will ever have.

Liam Neeson

Very often when you look at the moon, you see only a part of it, but you know there is a much larger object there. Very often we look (or converse) with a person, and we see or are aware of only a small sliver of their life and we may think that is all there is. Try to get to know more about the whole person!

Source Unknown

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

Jan Morris

From the Taoist point of view, the natural result of this harmonious way of living is happiness.

Benjamin Hoff

Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination... a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out.

Karen Thompson Walker

Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.

William Cowper

There is no problem the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.

Samuel Johnson