Luna had decorated her bedroom ceiling with five beautifully painted faces: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, and Neville. They were not moving as the portraits at Hogwarts moved, but there was a certain magic about them all the same: Harry thought they breathed. What appeared to be fine golden chains wove around the pictures, linking them together, but after examining them for a minute or so, Harry realized that the chains were actually one word, repeated a thousand times in golden ink: . . . . . . . . .

Speak little and well if you wish to be esteemed a person of merit.

Proverb

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'

Lyndon B. Johnson

Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.

John Charles Polanyi

The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.

Gilbert Murray

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

Kurt Vonnegut

The only salvation of the world today... is the rapid dissemination of the basic values of the West, that is, the ideas of democracy, human rights, the civil society, and the free market.

Vaclav Havel

Such manifestations I account as representing the creative leadership of the new forces of thought and appreciation which attend changes in technological pattern and therefore of the pattern of human relationships in society.

John Grierson

In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined a sweeter life.

Hugh Hefner

I don't know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope.

Joel Osteen

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

Anon.

There was a pleasant party of barge people round the fire. You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk. This is the real secret of pleasant society.

E. Nesbit

I really subscribe to that old adage that you should never let the audience get ahead of you for a second. So if the film's abrasive and wrongfoots people then, y'know, that's great. But I hope it involves an audience.

Paul Thomas Anderson