It is a terrible smudge on grace and unconditional love to think that God simply winks and smiles at our poor choices; that God must rubber stamp everything we do or else He is unloving. God loves us unconditionally regardless of our performance - good or bad. When God challenges us or corrects us He does not stop loving us. In the safety of His love we can receive correction and challenge without shame or feelings of rejection.

I'm lucky. The best possible place in the world for training is Addis Ababa, so I am home all the time except when I am racing. I like to be there, near my family, my kids, also the real estate business I run with my wife.

Haile Gebrselassie

A good teacher must know the rules a good pupil, the exceptions.

Martin H. Fischer

Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. But ... The storm broke. Sit down! Shut up! Take the conch! Sod you! Shut up! Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum. Simon went on. We could be sort of. . . . Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness. Inspiration came to him. What's the dirtiest thing there is? As an answer Jack dropped into the uncomprehending silence that followed it the one crude expressive syllable. Release was immense. Those littluns who had climbed back on the twister fell off again and did not mind. The hunters were screaming with delight.(note: The inherent evils within man appear once law and order are taken from society.)

William Golding, Lord of the Fli

...there is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth.

Paulo Coelho

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Henry David Thoreau

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

Philip Roth

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

Diane Ackerman, A Natural Histor

So if you care to find me/Look to the western sky/As someone told me lately/Everyone deserves the chance to fly!/And if I'm flying solo/At least I'm flying free/Tell those who'd ground me/Take a message back from me/Tell them how I am defying gravity!/I'm flying high defying gravity/And soon I'll match them in renown./And nobody in all of Oz/No Wizard that there is or was/Is ever gonna bring me down!/

Stephen Schwartz

If you pick something you actually enjoy doing, you have fun every day of your life.

Heidi Klum

When I go into making a movie, personally, I don't try to bring other pieces of movies with me.

Amber Heard

People have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't really accept you as one of themselves? Surely they notice that you are different--notice the difference of accent?' etc., etc. As a matter of fact, a fair proportion of tramps, well over a quarter I should say, notice nothing of the kind. To begin with, many people have no ear for accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. I was often struck by this fact when I was begging at back doors. Some people were obviously surprised by my 'educated' accent, others completely failed to notice it; I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw. Again, tramps come from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents is enormous. A tramp is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his mates, some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand them, and a man from, say, Cardiff or Durham or Dublin does not necessarily know which of the south English accents is an 'educated' one. In any case men with 'educated' accents, though rare among tramps, are not unknown. But even when tramps are aware that you are of different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their attitude. From their point of view all that matters is that you, like themselves, are 'on the bum'. And in that world it is not done to ask too many questions. You can tell people the history of your life if you choose, and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation, but you are under no compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be accepted without question. Even a bishop could be at home among tramps if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed that he was genuinely destitute. Once you are in that world and seemingly of it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy...

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan

All sins are forgiven once you start making a lot of money.

RuPaul