Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

Laughter shall drown the raucous shout;And, though these shelt

Louis Untermeyer, Prayer for Thi

So often, I read scripts and am like, 'This would never happen in real life. It's not trying to be funny. It's trying to be serious.'

Shailene Woodley

As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind- of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which cloud forever and shadows form, dreams persisted; and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if you questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumph, happiness prevails, order rules, or to resist the extra ordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand which would render the possessor secure. Moreover softened and acquiescent, the spring with their bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloud about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and fights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.

Virginia Woolf

I obviously have a great love and appreciation of jewelry, thanks to my mother, much to the dismay of both my father and my boyfriends.

Ivanka Trump

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.

Jodie Foster

Who has not hopedTo outrage an enemy's dignity?Who has not been sweptBy the wish to hurt?And who has not thought that the impersonal worldDeserves no better than to be destroyedBy one fabulous sign of his displeasure?

Jacob Bronowski, The Face of Vio

President Obama called for a 'we' nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave. And that's what we need most in our country today.

Anna Deavere Smith

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

John Green

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

Terri Windling

I don't think it's possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

Christopher Hitchens

...So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

Stephen King