It may be a cliche, but it's true - the build-up to Christmas is so much more pleasurable than the actual day itself.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Eugenio Montale

My dad has always been really helpful. He taught me that talent is a bonus, but persistence is what wins out.

Zosia Mamet

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

Edward Dahlberg

Our thinking is inconsistent with what we actually see. The eye is a perfect, natural organ. The seen image is a reaction phenomenon. Using an artificial optical apparatus, the same effect, for example, can only be obtained by a roundabout way, by means of a negative. The eye, on the other hand, immediately presents us with the diapositive, namely the true image. Our sight constitutes an unconscious, automatic transformation process, through which the negative image - like a photographic negative - (i.e. the effect), is transformed into a positive one, like a diapositive color slide. Our thinking, however, is really a purely individual, conscious process and therefore learnable. If our thinking is to attain the same perfection as our seeing, then we must change our way of thinking and learn to see reality, not as an action, but as a reaction. Perfect thought lies in the apprehension of the correct reaction, for before the eye can show us the positive, it must first transform the negative and in a certain manner must break up what it records. What we see therefore, is the turning inside out of what we receive. What our mind grasps in this way must be re-formed and re-thought if we wish to attain what we strive for.http://www.frank.germano.com/viktorschauberger_b.htm

Viktor Schauberger

Darling, everyone is beautiful in her ownway, and I am a fairy.

Gail Carson Levine

It doesn't happen to me anymore, because a fresh generation of Africans and Asians has arisen to take over the business, but in my early years in Washington, D.C., I would often find myself in the back of a big beat-up old cab driven by an African-American veteran. I became used to the formalities of the : on some hot and drowsy Dixie-like afternoon I would flag down a flaking Chevy. Behind the wheel, leaning wa-aay back and relaxed, often with a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth (and, I am not making this up, but sometimes also with a genuine porkpie hat on the back of his head) would be a grizzled man with the waist of his pants somewhere up around his armpits. I would state my desired destination. In accordance with ancient cabdriver custom, he would say nothing inresponse but simply engage the stickshift on his steering wheel and begin to cruise in a leisurely fashion. There would be a pause. Then: 'You from England?' I would always try to say something along the lines of 'Well, I'm in no position to deny it.' This occasionally got me a grin; in any case, I always knew what was coming next. 'I was there once.' 'Were you in the service?' 'I sure was.' 'Did you get to Normandy?' 'Yes, sir.' But it wasn't Normandy or combat about which they wanted to reminisce. (With real combat veterans, by the way, it almost never is.) It was England itself. 'Man did it know how to rain and the warm beer. Nice people, though. Real nice.' I would never forget to say, as I got out and deliberately didn't overtip (that seeming a cheap thing to do), how much this effort on their part was remembered and appreciated.

Christopher Hitchens

Very often, I don't make it through moments of recording because it is genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous that a 60-year-old grown man is making these noises.

David Ogden Stiers

I'll keep us out of war with Oklahoma!

Kinky Friedman

I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.

Orson Welles

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Henrik Ibsen

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle -- the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

Karl Popper

I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

William Gilbert