"Life is simply experience; for reasons not readily discerned, we attempt to go on."
— Scott Turow

"Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Most of us, in our civilized society, rely too heavily on reasoning capacity to make things happen. We've been raised to believe that logic will prevail. Logic, in and of itself, will rarely influence people. Most often logic doesn't work."
— Herb Cohen

"'No' is a reaction, not a position. The people who react negatively to your proposal simply need time to evaluate it and adjust their thinking. With the passage of sufficient time and repeated efforts on your part, almost every 'no' can be transformed into a 'maybe' and eventually a 'yes'."
— Herb Cohen

"If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"By Gryffindor, the bravest were
Prized far beyond the rest;
For Ravenclaw, the cleverest
Would always be the best;
For Hufflepuff, hard workers were
Most worthy of admission;
And power-hungry Slytherin
Loved those of great ambition."
— J.K. Rowling

"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"A man without words is a man without thought."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."
— John Steinbeck

"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
— John Steinbeck

"An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?"
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Let's say that when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?"
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"For the most part people are not curious except about themselves."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults"
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do."
— Atul Gawande (Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science)

"Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"We are all honorable men here, we do not have to give each other assurances as if we were lawyers."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn't go together except in dire emergencies, if then."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"You cannot say 'no' to the people you love, not often. That's the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a 'yes'. Or you have to make them say 'no.' You have to take time and trouble."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"Many young men started down a false path to their true destiny. Time and fortune usually set them aright."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"She emptied her mind of all thought of herself, of her children, of all anger, of all rebellion, of all questions. Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

"Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only a species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not . . . not the way his face said he felt."
— Stephen King (Cujo)

"But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years."
— Stephen King (Cujo)

"We'll just have to get along. That's what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other."
— Stephen King (Cujo)

"She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference."
— Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs)

"If a man felt hostility and aversion, but saw that he had poor or no grounds for his feeling, the remedy was to look for good or at least better grounds--a search hid predisposing thoughts would help him in."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)

"The first test of ability and intelligence is to find a field of endeavor in which profits are large and risks small."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)

"Bailey might not have great intelligence or abilities, but his whole aim, thought and study was that of the born leader--to look out for himself; and he did it with that born-leader's confidence and intensity that draws along the ordinary uncertain man, who soon confuses his own interest and his own safety with that of the leader."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)

"At Childerstown High School and at college he had never led his class nor taken prizes; but, without being aware that he did, he really blamed this on his failure to work hard, or any harder than he needed to. . . . What he did not know, what Paul Bonbright, among others, showed him, was that those abilities of his that got him, without distinction but also without much exertion, through all previous lessons and examinations, were not first rate abilities handicapped by laziness, but second rate, by no degree of effort or assiduity to be made the equal of abilities like Bonbright's."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)

"The innocent supposition, entertained by most people, that even if they are not brilliant, they are not dumb, is correct only in a very relative sense."
— James Gould Cozzens (The Just and the Unjust)

"Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions."
— Stephen King (Desperation)

"'Why didn't you kill me like you did that guy back there? Billy? Or does it even make any sense to ask? Are you beyond why?'

'Oh shit, we're all beyond why, you know that.'"
— Stephen King (Desperation)

"God is cruel. . . . But life is more than just steering a course around pain."
— Stephen King (Desperation)

"How else could he go on, except with merciful incomprehension held before him like a shield? How could anyone?"
— Stephen King (Desperation)

"I do not know everything; still many things I understand."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

"Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike"
— Clarence Thomas (My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir)

"I could tell...that my friends were doing their best to get across the message that I wasn't Frankenstein's monster but a perfectly normal human being. What they didn't understand was that my opponents didn't care who I was. Even if they had wanted to know the truth about me, it would have made no sense to them, since I refused to stay in my place and play by their rules and was too complicated to fit into their simple-minded, stereotypical pigeonholes. In any case, I couldn't be defeated without first being caricatured and dehumanized...[T]hey couldn't allow my life to be seen as the story of an ordinary person who, like most people, had worked out his problems step by unsure step. That would have been too honest-and too human."
— Clarence Thomas (My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir)

""The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.""
— Robert Harris

"It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy."
— Scott Turow (Limitations)