Oh, stuff the critics. I don't care. Too many people are snooty about classical. Look, I wasn't brought up in a home where we listened to classical music. It was a singing teacher that thought it would be best for my voice. Then I moved into crossover. And if that makes the music accessible to more people, then great.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

Knut Hamsun

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery --always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Virginia Woolf

I've watched a lot of mid-career people, and Yogi Berra says you can observe a lot just by watching. I've concluded that most people enjoy learning and growing. And many are dearly troubled by the self-assessments of mid-career. Such self-assessments are no great problem at your age. You're young and moving up. The drama of your own rise is enough. But when you reach middle age, when your energies aren't what they used to be, then you'll begin to wonder what it all added up to; you'll begin to look for the figure in the carpet of your life. I have some simple advice for you when you begin that process. Don't be too hard on yourself. Look ahead. Someone said that Life is the art of drawing without an eraser. And above all don't imagine that the story is over. Life has a lot of chapters.

John W. Gardner, Personal Renewa

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Susan Sontag

The eyes like sentinel occupy the highest place in the body.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

I can look at the future with anticipation. And it's comforting to know that someday, as Christians, we'll be able to look back and have a little more clarity on why certain things in life happened.

Amy Grant

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Susan Sontag

To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.

Irving Babbitt

A woman asking Am I good? Am I satisfied? is extremely selfish. The less women fuss about themselves, the less they talk to other women, the more they try to please their husbands, the happier the marriage is going to be.

Barbara Cartland

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

We arrive at the truth, not by the reason only, but also by the heart.

Blaise Pascal

While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Sarah Vowell