The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.

Elizabeth Taylor. In her heyday, she was amazing.

Joe Jonas

The sense of an entailed disadvantage -- the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

George Eliot

The legislative job of the President is especially important to the people who have no special representatives to plead their cause before Congressand that includes the great majority. I sometimes express it by saying the President is the only lobbyist that one hundred and fifty million Americans have. The other twenty million are able to employ people to represent themand thats all right, its the exercise of the right of petitionbut someone has to look after the interests of the one hundred and fifty million that are left.

Harry S Truman

Life is not a matter of chance...it is a matter of choice.

Ka

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

E. M. Cioran

The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.

Victor Hugo

When you have to do something, you have to do it. Putting it off only makes it worse. Believe me, I know.

Sarah Addison Allen

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.

Orson Scott Card

People have to be educated and they have to stick to it. If people lose that respect, an awful lot is lost.

Stephen Breyer

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.

Russell Hoban

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

Randolph Silliman Bourne, Youth