We need to distinguish between nostalgia and the reassuring memory of happy times, which serves to link the present to the past and to provide a sense of continuity. The emotional appeal of happy memories does not depend on disparagement of the present, the hallmark of the nostalgic attitude. Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging. Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection. Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer.

Health is not valued till sickness comes.

Thomas Fuller

Every person is responsible for all the good within the scope of his abilities, and for no more, and none can tell whose sphere is the largest.

Gail Hamilton

But you still need the two: the dark and the light. You can't see one without the other.

Julia Green

Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it,- without having regard to any religion or opinion.

Maimonides

I think what I love most about writing is that feeling that you really nailed something. I rarely feel it with a whole piece, but sometimes with a line you feel that it really captured what it is that you had inside you and you got it out for a stranger to read, someone who may never love you or meet you, but he or she is going to get that experience from that line.

Andre Dubus

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens

Thomas Jefferson

Law never made men a whit more just.

Henry David Thoreau

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Steven Wright

Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships.

Ansel Adams

To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.

Agnes Martin

It would be better for us to have some doubts in an honest pursuit of truth, than it would be for us to be certain about something that was not true.

Daniel Wallace

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge