Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

P. G. Wodehouse

There is only one thing that arouses animals more than pleasure, and that is pain. Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him.

Umberto Eco

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

Kate Christensen

The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.

Jeff Goodell

I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

My idea of an educated person is one who can converse on one subject for more than two minutes.

Robert Millikan

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Cleveland Amory

I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that's how the album came out so dark.

Vanilla Ice

I'm astonished by my success.

Danielle Steel

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

Hector Hugh Munro

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels, 199