"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are."
— Bertolt Brecht

"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook."
— William James

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one."
— E.B. White

""Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh.
"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning, which I doubt," said he.
"Why, what's the matter?"
"Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it."
"Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose.
"Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.""
— A.A. Milne

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself."
— Marlene Dietrich

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"When there’s an elephant in the room introduce him."
— Randy Pausch

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
— Virginia Woolf

"When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”"
— Virginia Woolf

"What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one."
— Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. "
— Virginia Woolf

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. "
— Virginia Woolf