Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or very foolish imagine otherwise

And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age.

Lisa See

Mercy Falls was all about rumors, and the rumor on Jack was that he got his short fuse from his dad. I didn't know about that. It seemed like you ought to pick the sort of person you would be, no matter what your parents were like.

Maggie Stiefvater

Anytime you suffer a setback or disappointment, put your head down and plow ahead.

Les Brown

That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.

C.S. Lewis

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there -- I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.

Andy Warhol

The Mystic Bond of Brotherhood makes all men one.

Thomas Carlyle

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

Michael Cunningham

If you want happiness for an hour -- take a nap. If you want happiness for a day -- go fishing. If you want happiness for a month -- get married. If you want happiness for a year -- inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime -- help someone else.

Chinese Proverb

I will thank God for the day and the moment I have.

Jim Valvano

The artist simply reveals, he doesn't explain. Freud tried to figure this out because he felt it very important to understand what makes a creative person tick. And he said that he had failed. In other words, I don't think that the artist is a scientist; he's almost the antithesis of the scientist. He cannot explain, he can only state. He makes a poetic statement, and the psychiatrist figures out why that is a universal truth. The psychiatrist tells people why they behave the way they do; the artist tells how they behave.

William Eastlake, interview, 197

Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.

Terry Pratchett

More important is the fact that embryonic stem cell research could lead to new treatments and cures for the many Americans afflicted with life-threatening and debilitating diseases.

Ron Kind