Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.

Vladimir Nabokov

Today, I think the attitude is that governing is not necessarily good politics, and the result is that it's much more partisan and much more divided.

Leon Panetta

A fool and his money are soon parted.

Thomas Tusser

The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.

Thucydides

a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment. Which is pretty amazing, when you actually think about it.

Sarah Dessen

A writer is a person who has solutions for which there are no riddles.

Gregory Nunn

Justice, Sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together. Wherever her temple stands, and so long as it is duly honoured, there is a foundation for social security; general happiness and the improvement and progress of our race. And whoever labours on this edifice with usefulness and distinction, whoever clears its foundations, strenthens its pillars, adores its entablatures or contributes to raise its august dome, still higher in the skies, connects himself in name and fame and character with that which is and must be as durable as the freedom of human society.

Daniel Webster, funeral oration

How easy love makes fools of us.

Moliere

The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters.

Thomas Jefferson

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

Bill Bryson

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

Frank Herbert

I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.

St. Bernard