I rejected the notion that my race or sex would bar my success in life.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

Rita Dove

I condole with you, we have lost a most dear and valuable relation, but it is the will of God and Nature that these mortal bodies be laid aside, when the soul is to enter into real life; 'tis rather an embrio state, a preparation for living; a man is not completely born until he be dead: Why should we grieve that a new child is born among the immortals? A new member added to their happy society? We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while they can afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God -- when they become unfit for these purposes and afford us pain rather than pleasure -- instead of an aid, become an incumbrance and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way. We ourselves prudently choose a partial death. In some cases a mangled painful limb, which cannot be restored, we willingly cut off -- He who plucks out a tooth, parts with it freely since the pain goes with it, and he that quits the whole body, parts at once with all pains and possibilities of pains and diseases it was liable to, or capable of making him suffer.Our friend and we are invited abroad on a party of pleasure -- that is to last forever -- His chair was first ready and he is gone before us -- we could not all conveniently start together, and why should you and I be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and we know where to find him.

Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Eli

If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?

Martin Scorsese

We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

Sam Keen

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.

Samuel Butler

Having lots of siblings is like having built-in best friends.

Kim Kardashian

I'm cool with where I'm at. It's certain things I wanna do to be better, but I'm good.

Jazmine Sullivan

The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

Well, the rollout of new technology always affects how wizards do business.

Diane Duane

Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.

C. W. Ceran

I have sometimes asked myself whether my country is the better for my having lived at all? I do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the following things; but they would have been done by others; some of them, perhaps, a little better.

Thomas Jefferson

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

Michel de Montaigne