Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Though thou loved her as thyself,As a self of purer clay,Tho' her parting dims the day,Stealing grace from all alive,Heartily know,When half-gods go,The gods arrive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

Dave Barry

I know a lot of athletes and models are written off as just bodies. I never felt used for my body.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man.

Galileo Galilei

In the old days, one married a wife; now one forms a company with a female partner, or moves in to live with a friend. And then one seduces the partner, or defiles the friend.

J. August Strindberg

On the contrary, art consists of inventing and not copying. The Italian Renaissance is a period of artistic decadence. Those men, devoid of their predecessors' inventiveness, thought they were stronger as imitators-that is false. Art must be free in its inventiveness, it must raise us above too much reality. This is its goal, whether it is poetry or painting. The plastic life, the picture, is made up of harmonious relationships among volumes, lines, and colors. These are the three forces that must govern works of art. If, in organizing these three essential elements harmoniously, one finds that objects, elements of reality, can enter into the composition, it may be better and may give the work more richness. But they must be subordinated to the three essential elements mentioned above. Modern work thus takes a point of view directly opposed to academic work. Academic work puts the subject first and relegates pictorial values to a secondary level, if there is room.For us others, it is the opposite. Every canvas, even if nonrepresentational, that depends on harmonious relationships of the three forces-color, volume, and line-is a work of art. I repeat, if the object can be included without shattering the governing structure, the canvas is enriched.Sometimes these relationships are merely decorative when they are abstract. But if objects figure in the composition-free objects with a genuine plastic value-pictures result that have as much variety and profundity as any with an imitative subject.

Fernand Leger

And life is what we make it.Always has been, always will be.

Grandma Moses

I've come to the conclusion that beautiful women in the West aren't comfortable finding strength in their femininity. They want to do masculine-oriented things to establish their femininity. It's a contradiction.

Wesley Snipes

The difference between a saint and a hypocrite is that one lies for his religion, the other by it.

Minna Antrim

Kindness makes a fellow feel good whether it's being done to him or by him.

Frank A. Clark

The best thing about my job, though, is stopping at the end of the day and rejoining the human universe.

Orson Scott Card

I am blessed to be surrounded by the people I love. I thank them for their patience and grace.

Matt Lauer