Use what talents you possess the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

In Sarajevo in 1992, while being shown around the starved, bombarded city by the incomparable John Burns, I experienced four near misses in all, three of them in the course of one day. I certainly thought that the Bosnian cause was worth fighting for and worth defending, but I could not take myself seriously enough to imagine that my own demise would have forwarded the cause. (I also discovered that a famous jaunty Churchillism had its limits: the old war-lover wrote in one of his more youthful reminiscences that there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result. In my case, the experience of a whirring, whizzing horror just missing my ear was indeed briefly exciting, but on reflection made me want above all to get to the airport. Catching the plane out with a whole skin is the best part .) Or suppose I had been hit by that mortar that burst with an awful shriek so near to me, and turned into a Catherine wheel of body-parts and (even worse) body-ingredients? Once again, I was moved above all not by the thought that my death would 'count,' but that it would not count in the least.

Christopher Hitchens

When the dead departed, they took away any falsehoods that they might have allowed us to believe while alive; we who are left behind have to embark on a different life, since the dead are no longer here to help us deceive ourselves.

Yiyun Li

He called out to his fellow monks,'Come quickly I am tasting stars.

John Green

Nerd love. It's a beautiful thing, while also being an object of mockery and hilarity for those of us who are more sophisticated.

Cassandra Clare

There is in superstition a senseless fear of God.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Marriage, laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.

Dora Russell

I never thought to myself, I'm going to grow up and fall in love with a man or I'm going to fall in love with a woman because my mother is a lesbian.

Ally Sheedy

I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.

Steven Wright

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

Peter Davison

Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.

Martin Luther King Jr.

He who possesses art and science has religion he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.

Samuel Johnson