Before my teen years, I was losing my hearing pretty quickly, and I was getting very, very angry. I was beginning to become an angry person because of that.

Let me tell you what a writer is. A writer takes comprehensive views, holds large convictions, makes wide generalizations. A writer's not English, Mexican, or American. A writer's not a woman nor a man. A writer's not Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, nor snake worshipper. To local standards of right and wrong a writer's civilly indifferent. In the virtues, a writer's concerned only with general expediency. A writer doesn't waste time focusing on fixed moral principles that aren't yet before the court of conscience. Happiness discloses itself to a writer as the end and purpose of life, and art and love are the only means to a writer's happiness. A writer is free of all doctrines, theories, etiquettes, and politics. To a writer, a continent doesn't seem long, nor a century wide. And a writer has ever present consciousness that this is a world of...fools and rogues, blind with superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, cruel, cursed with illusions, and frothing mad.

Ambrose Bierce

I feel like a good mom. I'm a strong woman now... Don't look down on me. Pray for me because I'm trying.

Fantasia Barrino

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.

George Washington

We are angrier with the sky than with our actions.

Sorin Cerin

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.

Mary Pickford

He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.

Orson Scott Card

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there -- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

Robert Doisneau

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong: beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, peolpe of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

Henry James

Major writing is to say what has been seen, so that it need never be said again.

Delmore Schwartz

INTENT reveals desire; ACTION reveals commitment.

Steve Maraboli

Shortly after you left the room, Bushell came over and spoke to your father. I was not near enough to hear what he said, but Maria Lucas told me afterwards that he had been -' (she smiled) 'amazingly impertinent.''Peter actually spoke to Papa?''He did. According to Maria, he had the impudence to criticise Mr Bennet for his treatment of you. I must say it gives me the most favourable idea of his character.

Jennifer Paynter

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery