Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

I still think in this country, and this might surprise you, the one thing that George Bush said as president that I do agree with, I love that phrase, 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Tavis Smiley

Excuse me, are you the imprint of a departed soul?

J.K. Rowling

Elizabeth could never address her without feeling that all the comfort of intimacy was over, and, though determined not to slacken as a correspondent, it was for the sake of what had been, rather than what was.

Jane Austen

I am the son of a small and far-away nation and the other laureates have all come from different countries from all over the world and we all were equally received here with signs of sympathy.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

Henry David Thoreau

There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

Booker T. Washington

Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone.

Martha Beck

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Harry Mathews

Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.

Oscar Wilde

Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.

Marianne Faithfull, Faithful 199

If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.

Anne Lamott

She was short on intellect, but long on shape.

George Ade