Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

Men die, but sorrow never dies;

Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, The Crad

No. Take the heart first. Then you don't feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there's no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It's the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It's the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It's the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days.

Jeanette Winterson

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

Neville Chamberlain

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

Jacob Riis

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

Jerry Saltz

Freedom is knowing who you really are.

Linda Thomson

I've loved you for a long time, ' she said. 'But there was always something holding me back. Maybe it was that I was afraid of an emotion that was so consuming. It still frightens me,' she admitted in a whisper. Tamani chuckled. 'If it makes you feel any better, it scares the daylights out of me on a regular basis.

Aprilynne Pike

That man is good who does good to others; if he suffers on account of the good he does, he is very good; if he suffers at the hands of those to whom he has done good, then his goodness is so great that it could be enhanced only by greater sufferings; and if he should die at their hands, his virtue can go no further: it is heroic, it is perfect.

Jean de la Bruyere

True happiness that stands the taste of time comes by recognizing and appreciating what we do possess.

Ogwo David Emenike

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

George Carlin

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

Ernest Hemingway

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

Frederic Chopin