Since I was a boy, from this house, I was out rescuing crocodiles and snakes. My mum and dad were very passionate about that and, I was lucky enough to go along.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (cha

To please universally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men.

Edmund Burke

I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.

J. D. Salinger

We didn't have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12 my mom took me to New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it.

Margot Kidder

You really don't have a life when you're working. I always think oh, I'm gonna see everybody on my days off. I'm gonna read so many books and see so many films and then three months go by...

Rachel McAdams

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.

Stephen King

Marriage, it seems, confines every man to his proper rank.

Jean de la Bruyere

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Albert Camus

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

Major Owens

As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it came, but she did not depend on it.

Jane Austen

I've had people ask me in interviews what it's like to have money, but that's not how it is. I have a middle-class life. I have a room in London but not a house, nor a BMW.

Beth Ditto

He that falls into sin is a man; that grieves at it, is a saint; that boasteth of it, is a devil.

Thomas Fuller