There's a boy whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. It would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I'm stable, and then I wouldn't have to do the work to get there. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone.

Let us each take up our flaming torches and mount as the blazing fireballs of light that we are and let's burn the skies and leave it with deep scars and let them be our signatures upon eternity as we go forth!

C. JoyBell C.

Some of the things I think I learned from that were very educational as far as just paying bills - the basics in dealing with a restaurant like that. It was just life - the education involved in running the organization, even on a small level.

Todd English

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

Matthew Arnold

[from ]For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.[...]The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: 'The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew...' and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist's deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.

Leo Tolstoy

The measure of your holiness is proportionate to the goodness of your will.

Jan Van Ruysbroeck

The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him. He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits become, in his presence, depressed and nervous.

Jerome K. Jerome

Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.

Richard Dawkins

Some lurid things have been said about me that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I'd only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn't seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin.

Christopher Hitchens

Tomorrow we shall meet, Death and I -.And he shall thrust his swordInto one who is wide awake.

Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 3

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.

Stephen Jay Gould

The more we shelter children from every disappointment, the more devastating future disappointments will be.

Fred G. Gosman