If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.

To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.

Henry J. Heinz

To love oneself is the beginning of a life long romance.

Oscar Wilde

SELF-ESTEEM controls PERFORMANCE/REALITY which stimulate SELF-TALK which reinforces SELF-ESTEEM. This cycle can work positively or negatively and is greatly influenced by the self-talk (I knew I wasn't good at -X vs. next time I'll practice and do better at -X).

Source Unknown

I used to always think that I'd look back on us crying and laugh, but, I never thought I'd look back on us laughing and cry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since the 1960s, we have seen the failure of the melting pot ideology. This ideology suggested that different historical, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds could be subordinated to a larger ideology or social amalgam which is America. This concept obviously did not work, because paradoxically America encourages a politics of contestation.

Edward Said

Love seeks a guerdon; friendship is as God, Who gives and asks no payment.

Richard Hovey

Rock isn't art, it's the way ordinary people talk.

Billy Idol

The child who defines a lie as being a naughty word knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word lie.

Jean Piaget

Mari remembered what she had read in the young girl's eyes the moment she had come into the refectory: fear.Fear. Veronika might feel insecurity, shyness, shame, constraint, but why fear? That was only justifiable when confronted by a real threat: ferocious animals, armed attackers, earthquakes, but not a group of people gathered together in a refectory.But human beings are like that,' she thought. 'We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.

Paulo Coelho

To understand the world one must not be worrying about one's self.

Albert Einstein

The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success. - From (2003) Rock My Soul

Bell Hooks

Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head? Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming. Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning--ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility.

Neil Gaiman