Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone's hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted--wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.

The only way to know how customers see your business is to look at it through their eyes.

Daniel R. Scroggin

Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe I'm drawn to it as a story element.

Gus Van Sant

The emancipation of today displays itself mainly in cigarettes and shorts. There is even a reaction from the ideal of an intellectual and emancipated womanhood, for which the pioneers toiled and suffered, to be seen in painted lips and nails, and the return of trailing skirts and other absurdities of dress which betoken the slave-woman's intelligent companionship.

Sylvia Pankhurst

In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life....Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of affective communication between people.

Leo Tolstoy

There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

Michael Ignatieff

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

Michael J. Fox

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do? I don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him? To shrug.

Francisco D'Anconia

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

Johannes Tauler

The eyes like sentinel occupy the highest place in the body.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Thomas Jefferson

I am not your sun or your g-----n sky, I am the fire that will burn all of your hope to the ground. I was born of the wild, darling, and I'm not here for you to love

p.d.

[She wasn't] a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts may count in heaven as high as heads.

Charles Dickens