In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.

That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.

Terry Pratchett

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Pr?s: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

Cyril Connolly

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.

Aesop

Would you guys choose to walk away from possibly the most incredible encounter of your lifetime just because you had to let it go sooner then you wanted? Just because you knew that it would never be?

Holly Hood

Glory is like a circle in the water, which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, till, by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.

William Shakespeare

I'm in awe of people out there who deal with Alzheimer's, because they have to deal with death 10 times over, year after year.

Marcia Wallace

My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

Samuel Johnson

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

John Steinbeck

As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new - and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend.

James Russell Lowell

Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.

Jean M. Auel

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

John Green

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

Sebastian Junger