It takes so little to make people happy. Just a touch, If we know how to give it, just a word fitly spoken, a slight readjustment of some bolt or pin or bearing in the delicate machinery of a soul.

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

Melissa Gilbert

Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

Lord Chesterfield

When I was a young boy, my father taught me that to be a good Catholic, I had to confess at church if I ever had impure thoughts about a girl. That very evening I had to rush to confess my sin. And the next night, and the next. After a week, I decided religion wasn't for me.

Fidel Castro, "The Economist", A

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.

John Updike

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, 'want' to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don't 'want' to cut down on my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc. etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which 'progress' is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.

George Orwell

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.

Alice Walker

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

Andrew Carnegie

She concedes that she's the one she pleases.

Kim Carnes

Who the hell are we to determine the next course of evolution for these people?

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

Thomas A. Edison

I know it sounds a bit corny, but I do think that beauty and sexiness come from within.

Rachel Stevens

Nature thrives on patience; man on impatience.

Paul Boese