C.S. Lewis

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

C.S. Lewis (The World's Last Night: And Other Essays)

Eleanor Roosevelt

"We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all."

Eleanor Roosevelt

Jonathan Hull

‎"It is said that life is too short, and that’s quite true, unless you are lonely. Loneliness can bring time to its knees; an absolute and utter standstill."

Jonathan Hull (Losing Julia)

Stephen King

"Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing."

Stephen King (Lisey's Story)

ML King

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy...'

ML King

Leo Rosten

"Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind."

Leo Rosten

Bob Marley

You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She's not perfect - you aren't either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don't hurt her, don't change her, don't analyze and don't expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she's not there."

Bob Marley

Haruki Murakami

But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

Lemony Snicket

"When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them."

Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

George Gordon Byron

"In secret we met - in silence I grieve. That thy heart could forget, thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee after long years, how should I greet thee? With silence and tears ... "

George Gordon Byron

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Megan McCafferty

"Loving you has never been the problem. What's troubling me is how loving you may never be enough."

Megan McCafferty (Fourth Comings)

Janet Fitch

"You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought me from there to here. Should I regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if I could uncouple them? Do I regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you could begin to imagine."

Janet Fitch

Brian Andreas

"I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you lie close against me while you sleep. There are no words for that."

Brian Andreas (Story People)

Lewis Carroll

"I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again."

Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass)

George Carlin

‎"I don't have pet peeves - I have major psychotic fucking hatreds." - George Carlin

Dean Koontz

"God is never cruel. There is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we did not, we would have no compassion for others, would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one."

Dean Koontz

The language of love

Caramel skin.
Devour him with your eyes;
drink in the sight of him.
Swallow him whole.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Kirsten Dewar

Words. Roll them on your tongue. Swirl them around your mouth. Breathe them in. Taste them: the rich vibrant golds and greens, the colours of jealousy and fealty; the yellows, friendship distilled, bottled sunshine; the seething, vengeful reds; passionate plum; the shy and retiring grays. Pause. Close your eyes. Study the pictures on the inside of your lids. Look at them closely. Do they whisper, and nudge and call out to be spoken? Consider their sound. Tease out each each syllable. Do the nerves grate? Can you feel the muscles in your back tense? Check your hands. Are they cold and clammy? Hot and sudoriferous? Are your palms open wide, or fisted balls? Would these words tease, tempt, tantalise, sending a frisson of what could only be sheer delight down the receiver’s spine? Or are they sharp, jagged, meant to hurt and harm? Are they royal orchid, or common garden variety? Were they nurtured in love, or deceit? Can they, should they live an existence independent of their speaker? Remember: words once spoken, cannot be recalled. Finally, having considered all these things, exhale: breath them into life. Speak. Give them voice.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Kirsten Dewar

The inspiration for this poem was a seed pod I found while wondering around in Kirstenbosch Gardens last winter. To me it looked exactly like a little hedgehog - and the inspiration kind of flowed from there.

Farthing Wood

Quilled hirsuteness,
hard, spiky, brown.
Solitary, nocturnal, pin cushion
barbed, bristling ball at sudden sound.

Hedge-grown, cartilaginous rodent,
bashful, and bowed:
soft, silken centre,
Nature’s mohawk, avowed!

[c]2008, all rights reserved.

Gordon B. Hinckley

"Love is the very essence of life. It is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Yet it is not found only there. Love is at the beginning also, and from it springs the beauty that arches across the sky on a stormy day. Love is the security for which children weep, the yearning of youth, the adhesive that binds marriage, the peace of old age, the sunlight of hope .. "

Gordon B. Hinckley

Max Lucado

"Flirt. Giggle. Dip your cookies in your milk. Take a nap. Say you're sorry if you hurt someone. Chase a butterfly. Be a child again."

Max Lucado

"This is just who I am to other people. And you became other people ... "
#Iwrotethisforyou #randomthoughts

Libba Bray

"We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds."

Libba Bray

Mary Anne Radmacher

"Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is."

Mary Anne Radmacher

Jeanette Winterson

"Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."

Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

Doris Lessing

"I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some years later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have."

Doris Lessing

Susanna Clarke

"After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue."

Susanna Clarke

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return."

Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

Frances Hodgson Burnett

"I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren't pretty, or smart, or young. They're still princesses. All of us. Didn't your father ever tell you that? Didn't he?"

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Lisa Lutz

"My father insisted that the boys in my life were directly responsible for my juvenile-delinquent tendencies. My mother, more accurately, assumed that I was the bad influence."

Lisa Lutz (The Spellman Files)

ML King

'The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy...'

ML King

Libba Bray

"You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, it’s a wonder we do it at all ...."

Libba Bray

Jodi Picoult

"The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies ... "

Jodi Picoult (Keeping Faith)

T.S. Eliot

"I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing ... "

T.S. Eliot

Gordon B. Hinckley

"Stop seeking out the storms and enjoy more fully the sunlight."

Gordon B. Hinckley

Margaret Atwood

"She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been all that convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting."

Margaret Atwood (Moral Disorder: and Other Stories)

Emily Brontë

"The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart, but really with it, and in it."

Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

G.K. Chesterton

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."

G.K. Chesterton

Pablo Picasso

"There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun .."

Pablo Picasso

Laurell K. Hamilton

"There comes a point when you either embrace who and what you are, or condemn yourself to be miserable all your days. Other people make you miserable; don't help them by doing the job yourself."

Laurell K. Hamilton

Mitch Albom

"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."

Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

Terry Pratchet

"There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short. "

Terry Pratchett (Mort)

Vincent Van Gogh

"At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky."

Vincent Van Gogh

Karen Marie Moning

"I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like."

Karen Marie Moning (Darkfever)

Melissa Bank

"I felt I couldn't lose anything else, but just then I realized I already had: I'd lost the hope that I would ever love that way again."

Melissa Bank (The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing)

Nicholas Sparks

"And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered .. "

Nicholas Sparks

C.S. Lewis

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

C.S. Lewis

James Baldwin

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."

James Baldwin

Nicholas Sparks

"I fell in love, despite our differences, and once I did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has only happened once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I'll never forget a single moment of it."

Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

Chuck Palahniuk

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."

Chuck Palahniuk

Albert Einstein

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."

Albert Einstein

Robert Frost

"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."

Robert Frost

(Aside: a friend commented that she had read this wrong. I replied, that as well :p)

Diane Setterfield

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic... "

Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

Aldous Huxley

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."

Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

Clement Freud

'If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking & loving, you don't ACTUALLY live longer; it just seems that way ... "

Clement Freud

Tamora Pierce

"They always forget the last part of that saying: curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back" - or something to that effect anyway."

Tamora Pierce

Virginia Woolf

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."

Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

Gore Vidal

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

Gore Vidal

Stephen Jay Gould

"We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."

Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man)

Markus Zusak

"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."

Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

W. Somerset Maugham

"He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."

W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition ... " - Bell Hooks

Janet Fitch

"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart."

Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

Rabindranath Tagore

"The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end."

Rabindranath Tagore

Rachel Carson

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our
strength .. "

Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)

Alberto Manguel

"At one magical instant in my early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to me, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. I became a reader."

Alberto Manguel

Ian Rankin

"His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life. "

Ian Rankin (Knots and Crosses)

Laurie Halse Anderson

"Another page turns on the calendar, May now, not April. I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. I spin and weave and knit my words until a life starts to take shape. There is no magic cure, no making it all go away. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore. I am thawing."

Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)

Maya Angelou

"The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them."

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."

Maya Angelou

La Dolce Vita

"There’s an ache deep in my belly. Like a bruise. A reminder. And I carry it like a child. Hand over the place where it lives. The spreading purple seeping into the meat of me. Tendrils creeping out to wrap around my heart, my breath, my eyes. Until it’s all tinted with shadow and the sky disappears. And the colour of you is only a memory."

La Dolce Vita

Maggie Stiefvater

"You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again."

Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver)

Maggie Stiefvater

"You're like a song that I heard when I was a little kid but forgot I knew until I heard it again."

Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver)

Suzanne Finnamore

"You are the closest I will ever come to magic."

Suzanne Finnamore (The Zygote Chronicles)

Susan Fletcher

"We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine."

Susan Fletcher

Susan Fletcher

"We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine."

Susan Fletcher

Ian McEwan

"And she did not miss his presence so much as his voice on the phone. Even being lied to constantly, though hardly like love, was sustained attention; he must care about her to fabricate so elaborately and over such a long stretch of time ... surely his deceit was a form of tribute to the importance of their relationship?"

Ian McEwan (Atonement)

Stephen King

"I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up DOES rejoice. Still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend."

Stephen King (Different Seasons)

Brian Andreas

"I was waiting for the longest time, she said. I thought you forgot.
It is hard to forget, I said, when there is such an empty space when you are gone."

Brian Andreas (Story People)

Robert Frost

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."

Robert Frost

Gabriel García Márquez

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."

Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)

Stephenie Meyer

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you"

Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Meyer

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you"

Stephenie Meyer

Nicholas Sparks

"Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself."

Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)

Corrie Ten Boom

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength."

Corrie Ten Boom

John Connolly

"For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be."

John Connolly (The Book of Lost Things)

Sue Grafton

"There's a certain kind of person who will do you in and then remain completely mystified by the depth of your pain."

Sue Grafton (E is for Evidence)

e.e. cummings

"Miracles are to come.
With you I leave a remembrance
of miracles: they are by
somebody who can love
and who shall be continually reborn,
a human being."

e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings

"...life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis"

e.e. cummings

Louise Erdrich

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

Jane Austen

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot"

Jane Austen (Persuasion)

Sue Monk Kidd

"Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life."

Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

Sylvia Plath

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."

Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

e.e. cummings

"Not being dead isn't being alive."

e.e. cummings

Anaïs Nin

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

Anaïs Nin

Maya Angelou

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Maya Angelou

Ingrid de Kok

Small Passing

For a woman whose baby died stillborn, and who was told by a man to stop mourning, ‘because the trials and horrors suffered daily by black women in this country are more significant than the loss of one white child’.

1
In this country you may not
suffer the death of your stillborn,
remember the last push into shadow and silence,
the useless wires and cords on your stomach,
the nurse’s face, the walls, the afterbirth in a basin.
Do not touch your breasts
still full of purpose.
Do not circle the house,
pack, unpack the small clothes.
Do not lie awake at night hearing
the doctor say ‘It was just as well’
and ‘You can have another.’
In this country you may not
mourn small passings.

See: the newspaper boy in the rain
will sleep tonight in a doorway.
The woman in the busline
may next month be on a train
to a place not her own.
The baby in the backyard now
will be sent to a tired aunt,
grow chubby, then lean,
return a stranger.
Mandela’s daughter tried to find her father
through the glass. She thought they’d let her touch him.
And this woman’s hands are so heavy when she dusts
the photographs of other children
they fall to the floor and break.
Clumsy woman, she moves so slowly
as if in a funeral rite.

On the pavements the nannies meet.
These are legal gatherings.
They talk about everything, about home,
while the children play among them,
their skins like litmus, their bonnets clean.

2
Small wrist in the grave.
Baby no one carried live
between houses, among trees.
Child shot running,
stones in his pocket,
boy’s swollen stomach
full of hungry air.
Girls carrying babies
not much smaller than themselves.
Erosion. Soil washed down to the sea.

3
I think these mothers dream
headstones of the unborn.
Their mourning rises like a wall
no vine will cling to.
They will not tell you your suffering is white.
They will not say it is just as well.
They will not compete for ashes of infants.
I think they may say to you:
Come with us to the place of mothers.
We will stroke your flat, empty belly,
let you weep with us in the dark,
and arm you with one of our babies
to carry home on your back.

Ingrid de Kok

Kenneth Grahame

"We shall creep out quietly into the butler's pantry--" cried the Mole.
"--with our pistols and swords and sticks--" shouted the Rat.
"--and rush in upon them," said Badger.
"--and whack 'em, and whack 'em, and whack 'em!" cried the Toad in ecstasy, running round and round the room, and jumping over the chairs."

Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows)

Rylee Dawn

"Write all your dreams on a paper. Make them into beautiful stories. Write like no one is watching but write because it fills the heart with joy. Write and never stop."

Rylee Dawn

Gordon B. Hinckley

"You will have significant experiences. I hope that you will write them down and keep record of them, that you will read them from time to time and refresh your memory of those meaningful and significant things. Some may be funny. Some may be significant only to you. Some of them may be sacred and quietly beautiful. Some may build one upon another until they represent a lifetime of special experiences."

Gordon B. Hinckley

Alice Hoffman

"I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible."

Alice Hoffman

Howard W. Hunter

"This year, mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a letter. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in word and deed. Keep a promise. Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Apologize. Try to understand. Examine your demands on others. Think first of someone else. Be kind. Be gentle. Laugh a little more. Express your gratitude. Welcome a stranger. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love and then speak it again."

Howard W. Hunter

Ann Patchett

"Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon."

Ann Patchett (Truth & Beauty: A Friendship)

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

"A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty."

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

Stephen King

'Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.'

Stephen King

Mark Twain

'The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug ..'

Mark Twain

Mark Twain

'Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you will have ceased to live ... '

Mark Twain

Joanne Harris

'Places all have their own characters, and returning to a city where you have lived before is like coming home to an old friend. But the people begin to look the same; the same faces recurring in cities a thousand miles apart, the same expressions. The flat, hostile stare of the official. The curious look of the peasant. The dull unsurprised faces of the tourists. The same lovers, mothers, beggars, cripples, vendors, joggers, children, policemen, taxi drivers, pimps. After a while one begins to feel slightly paranoid, as if these people were secretly following from one town to another, changing clothes and faces but remaining essentially unchanged, going about their dull business with half an eye slyly cocked at us, the intruders.'

Joanne Harris

Khaled Hosseini

' ... I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering it things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night ... '

Khaled Hosseini

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Success:

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kirsten Dewar

"I dread the day, coming round the corner I'll walk into him. I'm just not prepared to handle that. Because although he's gone from my life, he is no way absent. I wish I could move on. I've tried. But he's got his hook in me, and I can't seem to work it loose ... "

Sally Vickers

"The desire to be loved is as basic a need as that for physical sustenance. But to take delight in being loved requires nerve. For where life is most ardently awakened, it can be most excruciatingly extinguished and the fear of that possibility can tragically become the wet blanket which smothers the most sacred of... flames ... "

Sally Vickers (The Other Side of You)

Sally Vickers

"It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is rather that we would be crippled by what we lack, than face the consequences of placing our secret selves into another's hands ... "

Sally Vickers (The Other Side of You)

Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night ..."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Chuck Palahniuk

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice."

Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

Arundhati Roy

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

Arundhati Roy

Paulo Coelho

"Our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives."

Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)

John Greenleaf Whittier

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"

John Greenleaf Whittier (Maud Muller - Pamphlet)

Chuck Palahniuk

"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."

Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

Martin Luther King Jr

"Let no man pull you low enough to hate him."

Martin Luther King Jr.

Sarah Dessen

"Some people, they can't just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just...something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time. "

Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

Mark Twain

"The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for."

Mark Twain

Anaïs Nin

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

Anaïs Nin

Scott Westerfeld

"Haven't you ever known someone rejected by a lover, who, consumed by rage and jealousy, never lets go? They look on from a distance, unseen but boiling inside. The emotion never seems to tire, this hatred mixed with intense obsession, even with a kind of twisted love."

Scott Westerfeld (Peeps)

Brian Krans

"Don't exist. Live. Get out, explore. Thrive. Challenge authority. Challenge yourself. Evolve. Change forever. Become who you say you always will. Keep moving. Don't stop. Start the revolution. Become a freedom fighter. Become a superhero. Just because everyone doesn't know your name doesn't mean you dont matter."

Brian Krans (A Constant Suicide)

Dean Koontz

"Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next."

Dean Koontz (Fear Nothing)

Suzanne Collins

"You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope."

Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games)

Jane Austen

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you."

Jane Austen (Persuasion)

Barbara Kingsolver

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof."

Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

Lemony Snicket

"Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too."

Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

Marianne Wiggins

"Maybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness."

Marianne Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel)

Edith Wharton

"Each time you happen to me all over again. "

Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

Edith Wharton

"She said she knew she was safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.'

Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

Laurie Halse Anderson

"This is where you can find your soul if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you've never dared look at before. Do not come here and ask me to show you how to draw a face. Ask me to help you find the wind."

Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

Jodi Picoult

"There's some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving."

Jodi Picoult

Richard Laymon

"Except I think it feels more like an empty stomach than a broken heart. An aching hollowness that food can't cure. You know. You've felt it yourself, I bet. You hurt all the time, you're restless, you can't think straight, you sort of wish you were dead but what you really want is for everything to be the same as it was when you were still with him ..."

Richard Laymon (Night in the Lonesome October)

David Levithan

"Love and I once had a great relationship, but I fear we've broken up. It cheated on me, wrecked my heart, and then went on to date other people. A lot of other people. And I can't stand to watch it, since love's going to cheat on them too."

David Levithan

Anne Lamott

"And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore."

Anne Lamott (Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year)

Jodi Picoult

"After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken."

Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

Louise Erdrich

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

Valentine's Day

Because it's February 14th.
My take on love - all year round.

Lisa Genova

"She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that."

Lisa Genova (Still Alice)

Kevin Brooks

"I remember it all: every word, every breath, every tick of the clock . . . everything that happened is with me forever. I can never forget it. But that doesn't mean I can live it again. You can't live what's gone, you can only remember it, and memories have no life. They're just pale reminders of a time that's gone - like faded photographs, or a dried-up daisy chain at the back of a drawer. They have no substance. They can't take you back. Nothing can take you back. Nothing can be the same as it was. Nothing is."

Kevin Brooks

Kirsten Dewar

Madiba Magic
In celebration of 20 years of freedom ...

Nelson Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela.
Warrior, statesman, freedom fighter, Nobel Prize winner, Africa’s most celebrated, yet most humble son. How much do we via to wear, be associated, claim your“ 46664”.

How little did your captors realise, all those years ago, that the prison number they gave you, to rob you of your identity, to hurt, belittle and humble you, would one day be synonymous - across the world - with liberty, justice, and freedom, the catalyst for a nation so unique, so diverse, so blessed, that no rainbow, no matter how majestic, would ever even attempt to rival it.

You, who have transcended age, colour, gender, race and nationality – have taught us, through your example, to choose reconciliation; flatten our spears into plough shares; share one another's burdens, and cherish and value humanity - in all its shapes and sizes and colours. You inspire us like no other. Indeed, just as you once said that talking to a man in a language he understands, goes to his head, but talking to him in his language, goes to his heart - Tata mkulu, Madiba, father, we love you, respect you, and have heard you - you have indeed, gone to our hearts.

(c) 2008 all rights reserved.

Judy Garland

"Somewhere over the rainbow - skies are blue - and the dreams that you dare to dream - really do come true"

Judy Garland

James Joyce

"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."

James Joyce

Nicholas Sparks

"If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale."

Nicholas Sparks

Mahatma Gandhi

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

Mahatma Gandhi

Chuck Palahniuk

"I thought we were a real love relationship. I did. I was very invested in love, but it was just this long long sex thing that could end at any moment because after all, it's just about getting off. Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love."

Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

Groucho Marx

"Some people claim that marriage interferes with romance. There's no doubt about it. Anytime you have a romance, your wife is bound to interfere."

Groucho Marx

Anaïs Nin

"Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!'"

Anaïs Nin

John Green

"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane. "

John Green (Looking for Alaska)

Woody Allen

"The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it."

Woody Allen

Mae West

"Good sex is like good bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand."

Mae West

Douglas Adams

"Life is wasted on the living."

Douglas Adams

Ernest Hemingway

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

Ernest Hemingway

John Vance Cheney

"The soul would have no rainbow, had the eyes no tears."

John Vance Cheney

Maya Angelou

"Be a rainbow in someone else's cloud."

Maya Angelou (Letter to My Daughter)

Jon Katz

"I think if I've learned anything about friendship, it's to hang in, stay connected, fight for them, and let them fight for you. Don't walk away, don't be distracted, don't be too busy or tired, don't take them for granted. Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together ... "

Jon Katz

Mitch Albom

All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."

Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

Mitch Albom

"Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it."

Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala)

Lenny Bruce

"The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is."

Lenny Bruce

Diane Setterfield

"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled."

Diane Setterfield

John Green

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

John Green

C.S. Lewis

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."

C.S. Lewis

Tamora Pierce

"Every now and then I like to do as I'm told, just to confuse people."

Tamora Pierce (Melting Stones)

A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes."

A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

Alyson Noel (Evermore)

"I guess by now I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence."

Alyson Noel (Evermore)

Sam McBratney

"Little Nutbrown Hare, who was going to bed, held on tight to Big Nutbrown Hare's very long ears. He wanted to be sure that Big Nutbrown Hare was listening.

"Guess how much I love you," he said.
"Oh, I don't think I could guess that," said Big Nutbrown Hare.

"This much," said Little Nutbrown Hare, stretching out his arms as wide as they could go.

Big Nutbrown Hare had even longer arms.
"But I love you this much," he said.

Hmm, that is a lot, thought Little Nutbrown Hare.
"I love you as high as I can reach," said Little Nutbrown Hare.
"I love you as high as I can reach," said Big Nutbrown Hare.
That is very high, thought Little Nutbrown Hare.
I wish I had arms like that.

Then Little Nutbrown Hare had a good idea.
He tumbled upside down and reached up the tree trunk with his feet.
"I love you all the way to my toe!" he said.
"And I love you all that way up to your toes," said Big Nutbrown Hare,
swinging him up over his head.
"I love you as high as I can hop!" laughed Little Nutbrown Hare,
bouncing up and down.
"But I love you as high as I can hop," smiled Big Nutbrown Hare-
and he hopped so high that his ears touched the branches above.
That's good hopping, thought Little Nutbrown Hare.
I wish I could hop like that.

"I love you all the way down the lane as far as the river," cried Little Nutbrown Hare.
"I love you across the river and over the hills," said Big Nutbrown Hare.
That's very far, thought Little Nutbrown Hare.
He was almost too sleepy to think anymore.
Then he looked beyond the thorn bushes,
out into the big dark night.
Nothing could be farther than the sky.
"I love you right up to the moon,"
he said, and closed his eyes.
"Oh, that's far," said Big Nutbrown Hare.
"That is very, very far."

Big Nutbrown Hare settled
Little Nutbrown Hare into his bed of leaves.
He leaned over and kissed him good night.
Then he lay down close by and whispered with a smile,
"I love you right up to the moon- and back."

Robert Jordon

"You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long."

Robert Jordon

Benjamin Franklin

"Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five."

Benjamin Franklin

Thomas Campbell

"To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die."

Thomas Campbell

Jodi Picoult

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"

Jodi Picoult

Anaïs Nin

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."

Anaïs Nin

Robin Jones Gunn

"I look back now and realize that the gift of a true friend is that they see you not the way you see yourself or the way others see you. A true friend sees you for who you are and who you can become."

Robin Jones Gunn

Gordon B. Hinckley

"The remedy for most marital stress is not in divorce. It is in repentance and forgiveness, in sincere expressions of charity and service. It is not in separation. It is in simple integrity that leads a man and a woman to square up their shoulders and meet their obligations. It is found in the Golden Rule, a time-honored principle that should first and foremost find expression in marriage."

Gordon B. Hinckley

Kahlil Gibrán

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

Kahlil Gibrán

Friedrich Nietzsche

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Mortimer J. Adler

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

Mortimer J. Adler

Groucho Marx

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

Groucho Marx

Gordon B. Hinckley

"I love libraries. I love books. There is something sacred, I think, about a great library because it represents the preservation of the wisdom, the learning, the pondering, of men and women of all the ages accumulated together under one roof to which we can have access as our needs require."

Gordon B. Hinckley

Louisa May Alcott

"I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end. (Jo March)"

Louisa May Alcott

J.M. Barrie

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."

J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

G.K. Chesterton

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."

G.K. Chesterton

Douglas Adams

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Douglas Adams

City Johannesburg: Mongane Wally Serote

This way I salute you:
My hand pulses to my back trousers pocket
Or into my inner jacket pocket
For my pass, my life,
Jo'burg City.
My hand like a starved snake rears my pockets
For my thin, ever lean wallet,
While my stomach groans a friendly smile to hunger,
Jo'burg City.
My stomach also devours coppers and papers
Don't you know?
Jo'burg City, I salute you;
When I run out, or roar in a bus to you,
I leave behind me, my love,
My comic houses and people, my dongas and my ever whirling dust,
My death
That's so related to me as a wink to the eye.
Jo'burg City
I travel on your black and white and roboted roads
Through your thick iron breath that you inhale
At six in the morning and exhale from five noon.
Jo'burg City
That is the time when I come to you,
When your neon flowers flaunt from your electrical wind,
That is the time when I leave you,
When your neon flowers flaunt their way through the falling darkness
On your cement trees.
And as I go back, to my love,
My dongas, my dust, my people, my death,
Where death lurks in the dark like a blade in the flesh,
I can feel your roots, anchoring your might, my feebleness
In my flesh, in my mind, in my blood,
And everything about you says it, That, that is all you need of me.
Jo'burg City, Johannesburg,
Listen when I tell you,
There is no fun, nothing, in it,
When you leave the women and men with such frozen expressions,
Expressions that have tears like furrows of soil erosion,
Jo'burg City, you are dry like death,
Jo'burg City, Johannesburg, Jo'burg City.

Herbert Hoover

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."

Herbert Hoover

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Dunlop

" People talk about old age as the sunset of your life. Maybe in terms of the cycle of life- sure, you only get one sunrise. But. For all the blue skies and cotton wool clouds of the afternoons that you experience, how glorious is the unpredictable spread of purples and pinks that comes in the end? Something to look forward to.

Risks are just that. An actuary or statistician can analyse and predict based on probability, but can they predict the variables that seem to drop in on situations that make things seem worthwhile. OK- they probably can and do, but you get the point. Being paralysed by fear of maybes and what ifs is no way to live life. Unless they are the kind of maybes and what ifs that goad you into experiencing more, stepping out of yourself, being stretched. It can be a little painful, disorientating, but when you look back and see the winding path you have taken, you can start to understand that for all your lack of control over consequences, life can be amazing.

It doesn’t happen every day, but sometimes I feel like taking an Acapulco plunge off a cliff face and feeling the rush of the cool sea air as I hurtle towards an ocean of new experience."

Scott Dunlop

Dreams

"A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you're fast asleep."

Walt Disney Company (Cinderella)

"You may tire of reality but you never tire of dreams."

L.M. Montgomery (The Road to Yesterday)

"Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you."

Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows."

John Irving (The Hotel New Hampshire)

"…I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more."

Franz Kafka (The Castle)

Albert Einstein

"We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams."

Albert Einstein

Haruki Murakami

"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."

Haruki Murakami

Laurell K. Hamilton

"What is love? Sometimes it's just letting yourself be who and what you are, and letting the person you're supposed to love be who and what he is too. Or maybe what and who they are."

Laurell K. Hamilton

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments."

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Sarah Dessen

"What is family other than the people who have claimed you? In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they are the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. Friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers, none perfect, but you shouldn't expect them to be. You can't make any one person your world. The trick is to... take what each can give you and build your world from it."

Sarah Dessen

Jodi Picoult

"I have only known her for two years. But if you took every memory, every moment, if you stretched them end to end-they'd reach forever."

"Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true."

"You don't have to say I love you to say I love you," you said with a shrug. "All you have to do is say my name and I know."

"Can't you hear it?" you said. "When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.""

"Sometimes I think my whole life has been about holding on to you."

"Words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder."

"When you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself- is that what [love is]?"

"They say that there are moments that open up your life like a walnut cracked, that change your point of view so that you never look at things the same way again."

"... Remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help. "

"... People think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong. "

"What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty."

"The Inuit say that the stars are holes in heaven. And every time we see the people we loved shining through, we know they're happy. "

"There should be a statue of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after forty-two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. that there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass- if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays. "

"I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names."

'I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has its own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect,' she says. 'You love them in spite of the fact that they're not.' "

"If you focus on sandbagging the beachhead, you can ignore the tsunami that's approaching. Try it any other way and you'll go crazy.""

"You signed no contract to become a parent, but the responsibilities were written in invisible ink. There was a point when you had to support your child, even if no one else would. It was your job to rebuild the bridge, even if your child was the one who burned it in the first place. "

"Well I talk a little about that, but I don't admit that from the beginning I knew we were not meant to be together."

"There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you."

Jodi Picoult

Shel Silverstein

"Are wild strawberries really wild? Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child? Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam? Could they ever relax in a steam-heated home? Can they be trained to not growl at the guests? Will a litterbox work or would they make a mess? Can we make them a Cowberry, herding the cows, or maybe a Mulberry pulling the plows, or maybe a Huntberry chasing the grouse, or maybe a Watchberry guarding the house, and though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly can you ever feel that you trust them completely? Or should we make a pet out of something less scary, like the Domestic Prune or the imported Cherry. Anyhow, you've been warned and I will not be blamed if your wild strawberries cannot be tamed."

Shel Silverstein

Wallace Stevens

"Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers."

Wallace Stevens

Ray Bradbury

"Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers."

Ray Bradbury

Stephen R. Lawhead

"Tell me the word that will win you, and I will speak it. I will speak the stars of heaven into a crown for your head; I will speak the flowers of the field into a cloak; I will speak the racing stream into a melody for your ears and the voices of a thousand larks to sing it; I will speak the softness of night for your bed and the warmth of summer for your coverlet; I will speak the brightness of flame to light your way and the luster of gold to shine in your smile; I will speak until the hardness in you melts away and your heart is free...""

Stephen R. Lawhead

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contradictory! But I was too young to know how to love her."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Nick Cave

"Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethidine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here."

Nick Cave

Lessons for life ...

"Never lie, steal, cheat,or drink. But if you must lie, lie in the arms of a loved one. If you must steal, steal away from bad company. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink in the moments that take your breath away."

Unknown

Sarah A. Hoyt

"Then . . . I fell in love with you as you are. Fractured, maybe. Lost, perhaps. But I'm no prize either."

Sarah A. Hoyt

Tana French

"I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack "

Tana French

Alix Lew

"Dream, believe, achieve, shine, live, laugh, love,
seek, imagine, run, jump, breathe, see, forgive,
repeat ... "

Alix Lew

Pablo Neruda

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."

Pablo Neruda

Neil Gaiman

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."

Neil Gaiman

Erma Bombeck

"Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart."

"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me"."

"I am not a glutton - I am an explorer of food"

"When your mother asks, "Do you want a piece of advice?" it's a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway."

"Housework can kill you if done right."

"If I had to live my life over:
I would have talked less and listened more.
I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained and the sofa faded.
I would have eaten the popcorn in the "good" living room and worried much less about the dirt when someone wanted to light a fire in the fireplace.
I would have taken the time to listen to my grandfather rambling about his youth.
I would never have insisted the car windows be rolled up on a summer day because my hair had just been teased and sprayed.
I would have burned the pink candle sculped like a rose before it melted
in storage.
I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains.
I would have cried and laughed less while watching television, and more
while watching life.
I would have gone to bed when I was sick, instead of pretending the earth would go into a holding pattern if I weren't there for the day.
I would never have bought anything just because it was practical, wouldn't show soil or was guaranteed to last a lifetime.
Instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished every moment, realising that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.
When my kids kissed me impetuously, I would never have said, "Later. Now go get washed up for dinner."
There would have been more "I love you's" and more "I'm sorry's"
. . . but mostly, given another shot at life, I would seize every minute . . . look at it and really see it . . . and never give it back."

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else. "

"Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died."

"There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child."

"Don't worry about who doesn't like you, who has more, or who's doing what."

"When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911. "

"Cleanliness is not next to godliness. It isn't even in the same neighborhood. No one has ever gotten a religious experience out of removing burned-on cheese from the grill of the toaster oven."

"Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere"

"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick."

"The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one."

"There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt."

"If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead."

"Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?"

"Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?""

"Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity."

"Humor is a spontaneous, wonderful bit of an outburst that just comes. It's unbridled, its unplanned, it's full of suprises."

"My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint."

"If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."

"Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence."

"Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely."

"All of us have moments in out lives that test our courage. Taking children into a house with a white carpet is one of them. "

"In two decades I've lost a total of 789 pounds. I should be hanging from a charm bracelet."

"There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it."

"I come from a home where gravy is a beverage."

"A grandmother pretends she doesn't know who you are on Halloween."

"When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice, safe playpen. When they're finished, I climb out."

"Never lend your car to anyone to whom you have given birth."

"As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her."

"Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago."

"When God Created Mothers"
When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one."
And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands."
The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way."
"It's not the hands that are causing me problems," God remarked, "it's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have."
"That's on the standard model?" asked the angel. God nodded.
"One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word."
"God," said the angel touching his sleeve gently, "Get some rest tomorrow...."
"I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick... can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger... and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower."
The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed.
"But tough!" said God excitedly. "You can imagine what this mother can do or endure."
"Can it think?"
"Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise," said the Creator.
Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek.
"There's a leak," she pronounced. "I told You that You were trying to put too much into this model."
"It's not a leak," said the Lord, "It's a tear."
"What's it for?"
"It's for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness, and pride."
"You are a genius, " said the angel.
Somberly, God said, "I didn't put it there."

"Never have more children than you have car windows."

"He who laughs..... lasts."

"Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born."

"Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you. "

Erma Bombeck

Gregory Colbert

"The whales do not sing because they have an answer, they sing because they have a song."

Gregory Colbert

Richard Bandler

"The greatest personal limitation is to be found not in the things you want to do and can't, but in the things you've never considered doing."

Richard Bandler

Henrry David Thoreau

"If a man advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

Henry David Thoreau

Public Enemy

"Never let a win get to your head, or a loss to your heart.

Public Enemy

Johann Wolfgang van Goethe

"If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Vincent Van Gogh

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done with love is well done."

Vincent Van Gogh

Maya Angelou

"Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently."

Maya Angelou

Lou Holtz

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it."

Lou Holtz

Adversity

"The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all."

Walt Disney Company (Mulan)

Victor Hugo

"What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul"

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake. "

"The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only."

"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."

"To love another person is to see the face of God."

"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come."

"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."

"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face."

"Nothing makes a man so adventurous as an empty pocket."

"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor."

"He who opens a school door, closes a prison."

"Imagination is intelligence with an erection"

"The future has several names. For the weak, it is impossible; for the fainthearted, it is unknown; but for the valiant, it is ideal."

"People do not lack strength, they lack will."

"To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life."

"Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise."

"Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet."

"You who suffer because you love, love still more. To die of love, is to live by it."

"Fashions have done more harm than revolutions."

"What is said about men often has as much influence upon their lives, and especially upon their destinies, as what they do."

"Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory."

"When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the same spirit. Love, soar."

"He fell to the seat, she by his side. There were no more words. The stars were beginning to shine. How was it that the birds sing, that the snow melts, that the rose opens, that May blooms, that the dawns whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills?
One kiss, and that was all. Both trembled, and they looked at each other in the darkness with brilliant eyes. They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp ground, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts were full of thought. They had clasped hands, without knowing it. She did not ask him; did not even think where and how he had managed to get into the garden. It seemed so natural to her that he should be there.
From time to time Marius’ knee touched Cosette’s. A touch that thrilled. At times, Cosette faltered out a word. Her soul trembled on her lips like a drop of dew on a flower.
Gradually, they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fullness. The night was serene and glorious above their heads. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their frenzies, their ecstasies, their chimeras, their despondencies, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other. They had confided to each other in an intimacy of the ideal, which already, nothing could have increased, all that was most hidden and most mysterious in themselves. They told each other, with a candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth and the remnant of childhood that was theirs, brought to mind. These two hearts poured themselves out to each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul and the young girl who had the soul of the young man. They interpenetrated, they enchanted, they dazzled each other. When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid her head on his shoulder, and asked him: "What is your name?"
"My name is Marius," he said. "And yours?"
"My name is Cosette.""

"It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live."

"Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings. "

"So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this."

"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise."

"Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness."

"Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart."

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul."

"If I speak, I am condemned.
If I stay silent, I am damned!"

"Diamonds are found only in the dark bowels of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him that after descending into those depths after long groping in the blackest of this darkness, he had at last found one of these diamonds, one of these truths, and that he held it in his hand; and it blinded him to look at it. (pg. 231)"

"He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two."

"To die for lack of love is horrible. The asphyxia of the soul."

"Mothers arms are made of tenderness, and sweet sleep blesses the child who lies therein."

"There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher."

"Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them."

"The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so"

"Life is the flower for which love is the honey."

"Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the word is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thought to his conscience and returns from his conscience to his thought. This is the only sense of the words, so often used in this chapter, “he said,” “he exclaimed”; we say to ourselves, we speak to ourselves, we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence. There is great tumult within; everything within us speaks, except the tongue. The realities of the soul, though not visible and palpable, are nonetheless realities. (pg. 226)"

"What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears? The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of the mind."

"Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering."

"Let us say in passing, to be blind and to be loved, is in fact--on this earth where nothing is complete--one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have continually at your side a woman, a girl, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her, and because she cannot do without you, to know you are indispensable to someone necessary to you, to be able at all times to measure her affection by the degree of the presence that she gives you, and to say to yourself: She dedicates all her time to me, because I possess her whole love; to see the thought if not the face; to be sure of the fidelity of one being in a total eclipse of the world; to imagine the rustling of her dress as the rustling of wings; to hear her moving to and fro, going out, coming in, talking, singing, to think that you are the cause of those steps, those words, that song; to show your personal attraction at every moment; to feel even more powerful as your infirmity increases; to become in darkness, and by reason of darkness, the star around which this angel gravitates; few joys can equal that. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves--say rather, loved in spite of ourselves; the conviction the blind have. In their calamity, to be served is to be caressed. Are they deprived of anything? No. Light is not lost where love enters. And what a love! A love wholly founded in purity. There is no blindness where there is certainty."

"What a grand thing, to be loved! What a grander thing still, to love!"

Victor Hugo

Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Yet, I didn't understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently invaded; and who, until the last moment, refuse to yield out of pride and are afraid to express their own feelings to you."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Movie quote - Pirates of the Carribean

"Elizabeth Swann:
'There will come a time when you have a chance to do the right thing.'
Jack Sparrow:
'I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by.'"

Pirates of the Carribean

Brandon Sanderson

"You see, that is the sad, sorry, terrible thing about sarcasm.
It's really funny."

Brandon Sanderson

Nick Hornby

"Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on earth tolerable. "

Nick Hornby

Philip Pullman

"You are so young, Lyra, too young to understand this, but I shall tell you anyway and you'll understand it later: men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We bear their children, who are witches if they are female, human if not; and then in the blink of an eye they are gone, felled, slain, lost. Our sons, too. When a little boy is growing, he thinks he is immortal. His mother knows he isn't. Each time becomes more painful, until finally your heart is broken. Perhaps that is when Yambe-Akka comes for you. She is older than the tundra. Perhaps, for her, witches' lives are as brief as men's are to us."

Philip Pullman

Forgiveness

"Forgiveness has nothing to do with absolving a criminal of his crime. It has everything to do with relieving oneself of the burden of being a victim--letting go of the pain and transforming oneself from victim to survivor."

C R Strahan

"You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don't think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first (or last) kiss."

Jostein Gaarder

"Not forgiving is like drinking cat poison and then waiting for the rat to die."

Anne Lamott

William P. Young

"Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat...... Forgiveness does not create a relationship. Unless people speak the truth about what they have done and change their mind and behavior, a relationship of trust is not possible. When you forgive someone you certainly release them from judgment, but without true change, no real relationship can be established......... Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive. But should they finally confess and repent, you will discover a miracle in your own heart that allows you to reach out and begin to build between you a bridge of reconciliation....
Forgiveness does not excuse anything.........You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely."

William P. Young

Robert Jordan

"Any fool knows men and women think differently at times, but the biggest difference is this. Men forget, but never forgive; women forgive, but never forget."

Robert Jordan

Khaled Hosseini

"I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."

Khaled Hosseini

Gustave Flaubert

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage."

Gustave Flaubert

Azar Nafisi

"You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil..."

Azar Nafisi

Scott Dikkers

"Statistically speaking, there is a 65 percent chance that the love of your life is having an affair. Be very suspicious."

Scott Dikkers

George Carlin

"The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment."

George Carlin

C.S. Lewis

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

C.S. Lewis

Benjamin Disraeli

"There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics."

Benjamin Disraeli

Dreams

"You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you, Peter Pan. "

JM Barrie

"Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country."

Anaïs Nin

"What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?"

Libba Bray

"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."

Carl Gustav Jung

"Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."

J.M. Barrie

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Henry David Thoreau

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake. Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth."

George R.R. Martin

"I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream."

Vincent Van Gogh

"Yesterday is but a dream, tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope".

Kālidāsa