Without duty, life is sort of boneless; it cannot hold itself together.

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.

Marie Curie, Lecture at Vassar C

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.

William Hazlitt

Men should be like Kleenex, soft, strong and disposable.

Cher

Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.

Ogden Nash

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Marshall McLuhan

States that rise quickly, just as all the other things of nature that are born and grow rapidly, cannot have roots and ramifications; the first bad weather kills them.

Niccolo Machiavelli

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

W. H. Auden

I once bought an old car back after I sold it because I missed it so much and I had forgotten that it never ran. It was a British racing car. You know, because I just wanted it back. I could only remember what was good about it.

Connie Chung

The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog

Ambrose Bierce

Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos . . . . But the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes and, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. . . . My aim is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition. . . . I quite naturally looked upon Freud's theories as the application to the human being of a method the basic pattern of which is represented by geology. . . . Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. . . . But I had learned from my three sources of inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality.

Claude LeviStrauss, Tristes Trop

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.

Etty Hillesum

Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

Terri Windling