I was a sickly baby, and after two sets of adoptive parents took me home, they returned me to the orphanage because of a serious respiratory infection. But as they say, the third time's a charm, because my mom and dad adopted me and took me into their home where I was raised in a family full of love.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

Jodi Picoult

I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

Oscar Wilde

You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.

Richard Fortey

A little bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just.

Pope Francis

I do have the freedom to choose what I want to do and I'll continue to do that.

Moira Kelly

Be charitable before wealth makes you covetous.

Sir Thomas Browne

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Neil Gaiman

That's what I love about Aibileen, she can take the most complicated things in life and wrap them up so small and simple, they'll fit right in your pocket.

Kathryn Stockett

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

Chaim Potok

All that I really have to recount are observations and notes made during the course of my life as a painter. I ask those who will have the patience to read these notes the indulgence usually granted to the writings of painters

Henri Matisse

The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.

John Ruskin

There are limits to self-indulgence, none to restraint.

Mahatma Gandhi