What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

Philip Levine

Progress is man's mode of existence. The general life of the human race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where itmeditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awakenthat slumbering Progress.

Victor Hugo, Les Mis

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

Ralph Waldo Emerson

He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.

J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Steven Wright

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.

Anita Shreve

It's easy to see why pitchers respect McGwire. If you hit behind him, they're saying that they don't respect you. You have to change their thinking.

Eric Davis

His advice to me is basically to just love what you do and don't let the fear of failure stop you.

Oliver Hudson

When elected officials abandon our environment and ruin our natural resources, public health is endangered. I know the importance of providing a clean environment for our children I have attended more than one funeral for a child who has died from an asthma attack.

Gwen Moore

Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today his own he who, secure within, can say, tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

John Dryden

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.

Beverly Jones