Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times.

The essence of a quote is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying.

John Morley

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

Henry Louis Gates

Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be made at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late.

Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences

If I don't make it, I'll be very sad that there are things I didn't do, but I'm happy that I've done what I have.

Stephen Jay Gould

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Simone Weil

Not like Chinese food, where you eat it and then you feel hungry an hour later.

Ray Liotta

The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.

A. J. P. Taylor

When it comes to success, there are no shortcuts.

Bo Bennett

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

Larry Niven

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.

Daniel Day-Lewis

You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning . Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five.

Mitch Albom