"Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
— Douglas Adams

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.-Atticus Finch"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back-if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?"
— C.S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet)

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."
— Mark Twain

"That best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love."
— William Wordsworth

"Never regret something that once made you smile."
— Amber Deckers

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
— Oscar Wilde

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
— Dorothy Parker

"Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
— Jack London

""In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.""
— André Maurois

"If all the year were playing holidays; To sport would be as tedious as to work."
— William Shakespeare (King Henry IV, Part 1)

"Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it"
— Henry David Thoreau

"People’s good deeds we write in water. The evil deeds are etched in brass."
— William Shakespeare

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

"Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another."
— James Patterson (Sundays at Tiffany's)

"Red tape has killed more people than bullets..."
— Ben Bova (Millennium)

"The only way to make beauty ugly is to show it's crazy. Like twisting the top off a jar of something wonderful to eat, the moment he's hit by the terrible smell of it gone bad, even the hungriest person will drop the jar in the trash without a second thought."
— Jonathan Carroll

"Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family's mental health."
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted (Faber and Faber Screenplays) Screenplay based on the book)

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all."
— Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There'd Be Cake)

"History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?'"
— Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code)

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)