While many people are trying to be in tune with infinite, what they really are is in tune with the indefinite.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

Scott Turow

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

Terry Pratchett

Without obsession, life is nothing.

John Waters

I think maybe Hell is a place. But you don't have to stay anywhere forever.

Neil Gaiman

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

William Ellery Channing

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees.

Victor Hugo

The theory of rights enables us to rise and overthrow obstacles, but not to found a strong and lasting accord between all the elements which compose the nation.

Giuseppe Mazzini

Scepticism is the first step towards truth.

Denis Diderot

Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.

Honore de Balzac

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

Honore de Balzac

How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?

Plato

But the fevers are on me now, the virus mad to ravage my last fifty T cells. It's hard to keep the memory at full dazzle, with so much loss to mock it. Roger gone, Craig gone, Cesar gone, Stevie gone. And this feeling that I'm the last one left, in a world where only the ghosts still laugh. But at least they're the ghosts of full-grown men, proof that all of us got that far, free of the traps and the lies. And from that moment on the brink of summer's end, no one would ever tell me again that men like me couldn't love.

Paul Monette