All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn... American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Henry David Thoreau

Few things are impracticable in themselves; and it is for want of application, rather than of means, that men fail to succeed.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.

Janet Fitch

Tell the truth. Sing with passion. Work with laughter. Love with heart. 'Cause that's all that matters in the end.

Kris Kristofferson

The strongest passion is fear.

Jean de La Fontaine

The story is about being loyal to the truth as a nation, that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their troops do in war, good or bad.

Kevin Sites

Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.

Ty Cobb

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

Vincent Van Gogh

Being a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.

Andrea Dworkin

The only certain freedom's in departure.

Robert Frost

If you let society and your peers define who you are, you're the less for it.

Hugh Hefner

I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.

Howard Nemerov