My look, mind you, is not chocolate like Lauryn Hill, Whoopi Goldberg, or Naomi Campbell - it is pitch black and shimmering like the purple outer space of the universe. I am the charcoal that creates diamonds. I am the blackest black woman (41).

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will

John Green

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Alan Perlis

She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, all our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full of new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything that is familiar.

Paulo Coelho

I must create a system or be enslaved by another man s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

William Blake

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Kurt Vonnegut

There are a range of associated impacts related to increasing temperatures which affect both evaporation rates and river systems, which are already over stressed, and these will hit farming communities and the health of crop lands.

Peter Garrett

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

Jimmy Wales

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

Colin Powell

Even wisdom has to yield to self-interest.

Pindar

Suffering occurs when we want other people to love us in the way we imagine we want to be loved, and not in the way that love should manifest itself--free and untrammeled, guiding us with its force and driving us on.

Paulo Coelho

Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

When we're the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.

James Robertson