My music had roots which I'd dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.

Henrik Ibsen

It has to be able to play at the maximum expression and communication in every style, and the only way you can do that is - like Verdi said - working with a file, every day, little by little, until the orchestra's collective qualities emerge.

James Levine

My secrets cry aloud. I have no need for tongue. My heart keeps open house, My doors are widely swung. An epic of the eyes My love, with no disguise.

Theodore Roethke

I don't go looking for trouble. Trouble usually finds me.

J.K. Rowling

On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

Eric Burdon

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

Isaac Newton

My free time at home is usually spent emailing, listening to music, reading and talking on the phone. I wish I was on the phone less, but I have been fortunate to stay in touch with so many incredible friends.

Steve Nash

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Peggy Noonan

I don't like it when people on the street say smile or cheer up. It's a real cheap line. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling real grateful for everything. It's a solid time in my life. When people say I look sad, they're wrong.

Nicolas Cage

Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body.

Stanislav Grof

It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one's treasure will not win one anyone's favours one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone's camp... Beauty is the word that shall be our first.

Hans Urs von Balthasar