• "What is it that you most dislike? Passive-aggressive people and cilantro." Vanity Fair Proust questionnaire with Ina Garten Oct 2016
• "Claudio. Death is a fearful thing.

Isabella. And shamed life a hateful.

Claudio. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become 1355 A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about 1360 The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment 1365 Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death." Measure for Measure, III;1 ~WS

• "To save time is a wonderful quest if a person is able to make something wonderful out of it. Otherwise it's better to sit back and live comfortably and to be sure not to pack it with too many things to do as you would overpack your briefcase." - Albert Einstein March 26, 1923 in a letter to Sharpless Dodson Green, American educator, responding to Green's solicitation of a letter offering his pupils life guidance, [translated from the German]
• "There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self." -Ernest Hemingway
• "A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence and leaves others to determine if he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both." François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand
• Dum spiro spero means "While I breathe, I hope" in Latin
• Dr. Seuss: "Don't cry because it's over; smile because it happened."
• “There is no more respectable character on this earth than an unmarried woman who makes her own way through life quietly, perseveringly.” Charlotte Bronte
• "Beware for I am fearless and therefore powerful." Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." - Italo Calvino
• "Doubts are traitors that make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt" - Shakespeare
• “Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” --Roald Dahl
• 'The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.' — Jessica Hische
• "Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world's ills, misery, ignorance, and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation."

~Robert F. Kennedy~

• “A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.” ― Grace Murray Hopper
• "We're flawed, because we want so much more. We're ruined, because we get these things, and wish for what we had." --Don Draper, "The Summer Man" season 4
• "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated must translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values. Their proposals must be subject to argument and reason, and should not be accorded any undue automatic respect." – President Barack Obama
• "The ego says, 'Once everything falls into place, I'll feel peace.' The spirit says, 'Find your peace, and then everything will fall into place.'" attributed to Marianne Williamson, but could be Eckhart
• “She lives sparingly, as her life is trying to keep track of the stolen art. She is a woman of good taste but no means,” Jim Bissell, set designer for Monuments Men discussing Claire Simone (based on the real-life French art historian Rose Valland)
• “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” ― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters
• “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” - Nelson Mandela
• "We are so tired, we have lost any feeling of responsibility toward anyone but ourselves and, when we cut ourselves off from our brother, we prepare our own destruction." Vittorio De Sica about 'The Bicycle Thief'
• ""The Bicycle Thief" is, in essence, a poignant and bitter irony—the irony of a little fellow buffeted by an indifferent world. ...De Sica has artfully wrapped it into a film that will tear your heart, but which should fill you with warmth and compassion. People should see it—and they should care. BOSLEY CROWTHER December 13, 1949 NYT review of 'The Bicycle Thief'
• “A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it” -Roald Dahl
• “the artist in his work should be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” Gustave Flaubert
• "I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech." --Ralph Waldo Emerson "The American Scholar"
• "Because paper has more patience than people."--Anne Frank
• “Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days." -Sylvia Plath
• "Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all." - Aristotle
• “The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” ― Robert Cormier, born January 17, 1925
• "There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture." --Aaron Swartz
• “They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.” --Robert Green Ingersoll, 1882
• "No ever one said life is fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all." --The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
• "Charles Dickens walks into a bar and orders a martini. The bartender asks, "Olive or twist?"" --JGS Status
• "The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves." -Victor Hugo
• "I have demons. . . polite demons that would open the door for a lady carrying too many parcels, but demons nonetheless!" --Kevin McDonald (actor, Kids in the Hall)
• “Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit atrocities.” ~ Voltaire
• "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."― Albert Camus
• "The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote... This country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and the future generations...." -- President Barack Obama acceptance speech on 2012.11.06
• “What do you think an artist is? ... he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” -Pablo Picasso
• "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."― Jessamyn West
• "Dinnae open yer mouth an let yer belly rumble!" ~Scottish expression
• "A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues." ~Cicero
• "Just because something is familiar doesn't mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make - and no child ever does." ~Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Harvard
• "Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become." ~C.S. Lewis
• “The primary reason I am a Democrat is that they take the idea of justice seriously and justice is the sine qua non of our society. The simple idea of a social compact is required for civilised life. If you are in serious need I'll rally to your side, and you will do the same for me. That is the assumption that enables us to travel around the world and get outside our tribe: without it all life is brutal. And looking around, it is a tragedy that life is indeed brutal for a great many people in America today." ~Garrison Keillor
• "This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted." ~C.S. Lewis
• "The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves." ~E.M. Forster
• “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard” ~H. L. Mencken
• "Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good of life, he is happiest." ~Euripides
• "I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(" ~Steven Colbert
• "I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness." ~John Updike
• "To acquire the perfect degree of plumpness is the life study of every woman in the world." ~Brillat-Savarin, 1825
• "We need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t." Woody Allen 2010
• "When you change the way you look at things. . .the things you look at change." Max Planck
• "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick
• "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all." Emily Dickinson
• "Man's mind stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions." Oliver Wendell Holmes
• "I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget." William Lyon Phelps
• "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Abraham Lincoln
• “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi
• "We read to know we are not alone." C.S. Lewis
• “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Joan Didion
• "The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your action will be." the Dalai Lama
• "Doubt thou the stars are fire;/Doubt that the sun doth move;/ Doubt truth to be a liar;/But never doubt I love. Hamlet, from a letter read by Polonius, scene ii
• “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” ~__Thomas Jefferson__, as President, in a letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802
• “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.” ~__James Madison__
• "ignus aurum probat, misseria fortis viros". It translate to, "fire tests gold, misery test strong man."
• "May we learn how to navigate between false friends and true enemies." ~__Paul Coelho__
• "There are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy. You don’t have sex near unicorns. It’s an ironclad rule. It’s tacky.” ~__J.K. Rowling__
• "For me this is a book about responsibility. In the minor sense—how responsible we are for our own personal happiness, and where we find ourselves in life—but in the macro sense also, of course: how responsible we are for the poor, the disadvantaged, other people’s misery.” ~__J.K. Rowling__ (about 'The Casual Vacancy')
• "You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down." ~__Mary Pickford__
• “Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.” ― Anne Wilson Schaef
• "I'm coming to prefer dignity to compassion. Dignity empowers the sufferer, compassion just pities them." ~Christopher Hitchens
• "A person attracts what he or she is. The art of life is to sustain the feeling of the wish fulfilled and let things come to you, not to go after them or think they flee away." ~Neville Goddard
• "Life can't bring you the sublime gift it has for you until you interrupt your pursuit of a mediocre gift." ~Rob Brezsny
• "Aano Bhadra Kratvo Yantu Vishwatah Let noble thoughts come to me from all directions."
• "He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same." ~ Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights 1847