Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

What's the point in wasting a perfectly good brick wall when you have someone to throw against it, that's what I always say.

Cassandra Clare

The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto.

Bono

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

Napoleon Bonaparte

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps up omnibuses.

Virginia Woolf

There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria.

Mario Batali

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

Italo Calvino

From time to time, I'll look back through the personal journals I've scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages.

Hoda Kotb

Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread.

Norman Ralph Augustine

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Christopher Hitchens

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

George W. Bush

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Barbara Kingsolver

Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.

Pierre De Beaumarchais