I wish I wasn't an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I'm sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see me, Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, not the caboose on a train of grand duchesses. Someday, I promise myself, no one will be able to hear my name or look at my picture and suppose they know all about me. Someday I will do something bigger than what I am.

It is so easy to convince others; it is so difficult to convince oneself.

Oscar Wilde

Start living now. Stop saving the good china for that special occasion. Stop withholding your love until that special person materializes. Every day you are alive is a special occasion. Every minute, every breath, is a gift from God.

Mary Manin Morrissey

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

Julie Burchill

The last part, the part you're now approaching, was for Aristotle the most important for happiness.

Charles Van Doren

For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.

Robert Benchley, Benchley or El

So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.

William Hazlitt

Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?

Stephen King

All the nationalists are wasms -- except one, the most powerful of this century, indeed, of the entire democratic age, which is nationalism.

John Lukacs

The immature mind hops from one thing to another; the mature mind seeks to follow through.

Harry A. Overstreet

When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

Tom Robbins

Thus, by every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill.

Sir Winston Churchill

The truth is, I've been going pretty much nuts all year. I constantly have to fight being scattered. I feel like I'm on automatic pilot from fatigue. The hardest thing is trying to be present, living for the moment, for everybody in the family.

Patricia Richardson