Author Quotes

It is amazing how nice people are to you when they know you are going away.

It is better to waste one's youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Georges Courteline

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Sholem Aleichem

What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.

Antonio Porchia

Try not to turn your life into a race, least of all an obstacle race.

José Bergamín

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.

Please understand the reason why Chinese vegetables taste so good. It is simple. The Chinese do not cook them, they just threaten them!

Jeff Smith (chef)

Brilliantly lit from stem to stern, she looked like a sagging birthday cake.

He plants trees to benefit another generation.

Caecilius Statius

Beautiful... as the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.

Comte de Lautréamont

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

György Konrád

When all is said and done, monotony may after all be the best condition for creation.

Lady Margaret Sackville

When debts are not paid because they cannot be paid, the best thing to do is not talk about them, and shuffle the cards again.

Camilo José Cela

Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence; faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequences.

The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering-that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good.

L. Sprague de Camp

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

When urbanity decays, civilization suffers and decays with it.

James Norman Hall

I am naturally taciturn, and became a silent and attentive listener.

William Hamilton Maxwell

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

Johannes V. Jensen

In November, 1964 when I was a patient at the Mayo Clinic I though seriously about killing myself.

There was a positive side to not trying at something: you could always pretend that your life would have been different if you had.

To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado — a sea of desert.

Though Duty's face is stern, her path is best: They sweetly sleep who die upon her breast.