They are like the clue in the labyrinth, or the compass in the night.

'Tis an old maxim in the schools,That flattery's the food of fools;Yet now and then your men of witWill condescend to take a bit.

Jonathan Swift, Cadenus and Vane

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

Mark Twain

O month when they who love must love and wed.

Helen Hunt Jackson

Let us feel love, in the sight of our foes.Let our hearts melt, of the sight of hungry ones.Let us sing the music of forgiveness,the melody of love.

M.Padua

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

Jerry Saltz

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

John McGahern

Romance like a ghost escapes touching it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory.

George William Curtis

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction.

Arthur Koestler

The camera is a killing chamber, which speeds up the time it claims to be conserving. Like coffins exhumed and priced open, the photographs put on show what we were and what we will be again.

Peter Conrad

Any test that turns on what is offensive to the communitys standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they dont like, provided the matter relates to sexual impurity or has a tendency to excite lustful thoughts. This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win.

William O. Douglas

I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic difficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent the fulfillment of international truth.

Henri Barbusse

And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled.I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well.The hunger.The desire.Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.

Markus Zusak