"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
— Margaret Atwood

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

" After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings."
— Richard Dawkins

"There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt sqaure, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms - when I feel a wavelike rush of joy. This is my true religion: arbitrary moments of of nearly painful happiness for a life I feel privileged to lead."
— Elizabeth Berg

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
— Groucho Marx

"I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it."
— Mae West

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"I've buried a lot of my laundry in the back yard."
— Phyllis Diller

"From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it."
— Groucho Marx

"Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. "
— Lewis Thomas

"To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind."
— Geraldine Brooks

"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
— Isak Dinesen