People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.

William Shakespeare

There are obstinate and unknown braves who defend themselves inch by inch in the shadows against the fatal invasion of want and turpitude. There are noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye sees. No renown rewards, and no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, and poverty and battlefields which have their heroes.

Victor Hugo

In God's eyes, walking on water is no more miraculous than the ability of hemoglobin to bond with oxygen inside a red blood corpuscle.

Deepak Chopra

That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.

Barbara Ehrenreich

I want to see you shoot the way you shout.

Theodore Roosevelt

They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy, (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples) there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so simliar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become aquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

Jane Austen

Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done.

Amelia Earhart

The difference in the education of men and women must give the former great advantages over the latter, even where geniuses are equal.

Samuel Richardson

Everybody dies. What matters is what you do between now and when it happens to you.

Orson Scott Card

Behind the steps that Misery treads Approaching Comfort view: The hues of bliss more brightly glow Chastised by sabler tints of woe, And blended form, with artful strife, The strength and harmony of life.

Thomas Gray

Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.

Alphonse Karr

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.

Bill Bryson