Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

It is doubtful whether our soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a public.

George Eliot

As a child, I had to get up early for school or work. I'd get ready by myself. I'd set my alarm to wake me up very early in the morning, and be off to work, the family driver driving me every morning. I did it alone, my parents never coming in to wake me up.

Janet Jackson

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Marcus Aurelius

On September 17, 1914, Erzberger, the well-known German statesman, an eminent member of the Catholic Party, wrote to the Minister of War, General von Falkenhayn, We must not worry about committing an offence against the rights of nations nor about violating the laws of humanity. Such feelings today are of secondary importance? A month later, on October 21, 1914, he wrote in Der Tag, If a way was found of entirely wiping out the whole of London it would be more humane to employ it than to allow the blood of A SINGLE GERMAN SOLDIER to be shed on the battlefield!

Georges Clemenceau

It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.

Oscar Wilde

Give wind and tide a chance to change.

Richard E. Byrd

Australia is a nation of compassion. Courage and compassion. And the third of these great values: resilience.

Kevin Rudd

It is not the criminal things that are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and the shameful.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

I like all the adventure sports but I like to do them in a safe way.

Catherine Bell

Sometimes you ask God for something and you don't know what you're asking.

Mahalia Jackson

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.

Isaiah Berlin

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Brian Eno