One of the hardest things for me, now that I'm famous, is finding people who can read my stuff and give me an honest critique.

To have character is to be big enough to take life on.

Mary Caroline Richards

The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's own life in order to make room for God's life.

Edith Stein

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The best luck of all is the luck you make for yourself.

General Douglas MacArthur

Most recently we've been working in concert situations rather than clubs. because there aren't too many rooms there like Ronnie Scott's, that are pure music rooms, where people come specifically to listen to music.

Chuck Mangione

I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.

James Lovelock

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Joseph Conrad

Culture follows power.

Fareed Zakaria

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

Alfred Kazin

Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind.

James Hillman

People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but it's the way you live your life that matters. And the people you know. Valentine was Hodge's friend, and I don't think Hodge really had anyone else in his life to challenge him or make him be a better person. If I'd had that life, I don't know how I would have turned out. But I didn't. I have my family. And I have you.

Cassandra Clare

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

Margaret Atwood