Sensual pleasures have the fleeting brilliance of a comet a happy marriage has the tranquillity of a lovely sunset.

Before 1914 it was beauty that counted in cricket - elegance of strokes, stylishness of bowling action, quixotry in captaincy. The gallant gesture was just as important as the mammoth score, the picturesque as the efficient.

Bill Edrich

...and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.

W.G. Sebald

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Georges Cuvier

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

Cyril Connolly

I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

Roger Zelazny

Mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.

John Ruskin

Love is blind -- marriage is the eye-opener.

Pauline Thomason

Education is for growth and fulfillment.

Tom Robbins

Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

Aleister Crowley

I'm too old-fashioned to use a computer. I'm too old-fashioned to use a quill.

Christopher Plummer

As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.

Friedrich Nietzsche

My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.

Todd Gitlin