The Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life- loving people! How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling companion stands behind him! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant- ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the noise-so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all, suppose that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the near future is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost in this future-and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life to us to be more than friends in the sense of that sublime possibility. And so we will believe in our even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.

I don't really know how to relate to a long-term day-in day-out kind of comfortable relationship.

Diane Lane

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories.

Kevin J. Anderson

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

Simone Weil

There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.

Edith Wharton

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.

Edward Gibbon

I learned a long time ago with you that folks who were trying to be kind would rather do it with a macaroni-and-cheese bake than any personal involvement. You hand off a serving dish and you've done your job - no need to get personally involved, and your conscience is clean. Food is the currency of aid.

Jodi Picoult

Humans love truth and justice, and rejoice in ceremonies that honor those qualities. For that sentiment we should indeed thank God.

Alfred Day Hershey

At the New York Athletic Club they serve amazing food. People go there, get healthy, and then eat themselves to death - which is, I suppose, the right way to do it.

Oliver Reed

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Men and women should stay apart, till their hearts grow gentle towards one another again.

David Herbert Lawrence

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to keep it.

Willy Brandt