The Parthenon without the marbles is like a smile with a tooth missing.

Comedy is like music, and the way to make the best music is to have skilled musicians in your band.

Rashida Jones

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases -- threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Craig Raine

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

Ron Rash

Never memorize what you can look up in books.

Albert Einstein

If you got the money honey I got the time and when you run out of money honey I run out of time.

Willie Nelson

Justifying faith implies, not only a divine evidence or conviction that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, but a sure trust and confidence that Christ died for my sins, that He loved me and gave Himself for me.

John Wesley

I can see myself now, she said. And I can see what I want to be, ten years from now. But I don't understand how I'm going to get from here to there.

Jodi Picoult

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

For example, there is a species of butterfly, a night-moth, in which the females are much less common than the males. The moths breed exactly like all animals, the male fertilizes the female and the female lays the eggs. Now, if you take a female night moth----many naturalists have tried this experiment---the male moths will visit this female at night and they will come from hours away. From hours away! Just think! From a distance of several miles all these males sense the only female in the region. One looks for an explanation for this phenomenon but it is not easy. You must assume that they have a sense of smell of some sort like a hunting dog that can pick up and follow a semmingly imperceptible scent. Do you see? Nature abounds with such inexplicable things. But my argument is: if the female moths were as abundant as the males, the latter would not have such a highly developed sense of smell. They've acquired it only because they had to train themseleves to to have it. If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That's all. And that also answers your question. Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than he does himself.

Hermann Hesse, Demian, 1919

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

Andre Maurois

The man, most man,Works best for men, and, if most men indeed,He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:While, obviously, this stringent soul itselfObeys our old rules of development;The Spirit ever witnessing in ours,And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,Evolving it sublimely.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.

Jane Austen