"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."
— Neil Gaiman

"Consistency is the defense of a small mind"
— David Eddings

""We're living in momentous times, Garion. The events of a thousand years and more have all focused on these very days. The world, I'm told, is like that. Centuries pass when nothing happens, and then in a few short years events of such tremendous importance take place that the world is never the same again."
"I think that if I had my choice, I'd prefer one of those quiet centuries," Garion said glumly.
"Oh, no," Silk said, his lips drawing back in a ferretlike grin. "Now's the time to be alive - to see it all happen, to be a part of it. That makes the blood race, and each breath is an adventure." "
— David Eddings

"When love is involved no sacrifice is too great."
— David Eddings

""What was that?" Belgarath asked, coming back around the corner.

"Brill," Silk replied blandly, pulling his Murgo robe back on.

"Again?" Belgarath demanded with exasperation. "What was he doing this time?"

"Trying to fly, last time I saw him." Silk smirked.

The old man looked puzzled.

"He wasn't doing it very well," Silk added.

Belgarath shrugged. "Maybe it'll come to him in time."

"He doesn't really have all that much time." Silk glanced out over the edge.

From far below - terribly far below - there came a faint, muffled crash; then, after several seconds, another. "Does bouncing count?" Silk asked.

Belgarath made a wry face. "Not really."

"Then I'd say he didn't learn in time." Silk said blithely."
— David Eddings (Magician's Gambit)

"I've looked at the world for quite
a few years now and I've found that if I don't laugh, I'll
probably end up crying."
- Prince Kheldar of Drasnia"
— David Eddings

"If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own."
— David Eddings

"'Garion,' she said very calmly, 'the universe knew your name before that moon up there was spun out of the emptiness. Whole constellations have been waiting for you since the beginning of time.'
'I didn't want them to, Aunt Pol.'
'There are those of us who aren't given that option, Garion. There are things that gave to be done and certain people who have to do them. It's as simple as that.'
He smiled rather sadly at her flawless face and gently touched the snowy white lock at her brow. Then, for the last time in his life, he asked the question that had been on his lips since he was a tiny boy. 'Why me, Aunt Pol? Why me?'
'Can you possibly think of anyone else you'd trust to deal with these matters, Garion?'
He had not really been prepared for that question. It came at him in stark simplicity. Now at last he fully understood. 'No,' he sighed, 'I suppose not. Somehow it seems a little unfair, though. I wasn't even consulted.'
'Neither was I, Garion,' she answered. 'But we didn't have to be consulted, did we? The knowledge of what we have to do is born into us.'"
— David Eddings (Sorceress of Darshiva)

"Garion started shaving. "Try to keep away from your nose," said Hettar wryly. "A man looks quite strange without a nose.""
— David Eddings (Castle of Wizardry)

"Nothing that ever happens is so unimportant that it doesn't change things."
— David Eddings

"God save us from religion"
— David Eddings

"Zakath stared at the floor. 'I suddenly feel very helpless,' he admitted, 'and I don't like the feeling. I've been rather effectively dethroned, you know. This morning I was the Emperor of the largest nation on earth; this afternoon, I'm going to be a vagabond.'
'You might find it refreshing,' Silk told him lightly.
'Shut up, Kheldar,' Zakath said almost absently. He looked back at Polgara. 'You know something rather peculiar?'
'What's that?'
'Even if I hadn't given my word, I'd still have to go to Kell. It's almost like a compulsion. I feel as if I'm being driven, and my driver is a blindfolded girl who's hardly more than a child.'
'There are rewards,' she told him.
'Such as what?'
'Who knows? Happiness, perhaps.'
He laughed ironically. 'Happiness has never been a driving ambition of mine, Lady Polgara, not for a long time now.'
'You may have to accept it anyway,' She smiled. 'We aren't allowed to choose our rewards any more than we are our tasks. Those decisions are made for us.'

Sorceress of Darshiva, pgs 284-285"
— David Eddings

"It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?"
— David Eddings (Belgarath the Sorcerer)

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)

"...only in the surrender of the light (can) the darkness prevail.

King of the Murgos, pg 26"
— David Eddings

"The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.

INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that's because the shoe is too tight.
INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts.
INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it?
INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It's red.
INTERPRETER TWO: No blood?
INTERPRETER ONE: Nope.
INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.

Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.

An exemplary piece of confusion.

INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger- that's a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger!
INTERPRETER TWO: Don't be ridiculous. Let's go look at it.

Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner.
If you are not crazy, the second interpreter's assertion, that this is a bureau, will be acceptable to the first interpreter. If you are crazy, the first interpreter's viewpoint, the tiger theory, will prevail.
The trouble here is that the first interpreter actually sees a tiger. The messages sent between neurons are incorrect somehow. The chemicals triggered are the wrong chemicals, or the impulses are going to the wrong connections. Apparently, this happens often, but the second interpreter jumps in to straighten things out."
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)

"There should be a little voice in your head like the storyteller
is saying it. And if there's not, then you're just lookin' at the words.
~ LaKeisha ~
(9th Grader in San Francisco)
In an article about reading for understanding in WestEd's R&D Alert Newsletter, Summer 1999."
— LaKeisha

"As you slide down the bannister of life, may the splinters never be pointin the wrong way."
— Ed Norton

"If you are going to drown, don't do it in shallow water."
— Ed Raso

"Inside the heart of each and every one of us there is a longing to be understood by someone who really cares. When a person is understood, he or she can put up with almost anything in the world."
— Ed Hird

"Real journeys may also be true in the mythic sense."
— Betty Levin ("Polar Bears and Lemmings," Origins of Story, eds. Barbara Harrison & Gregory Maguire)

"Can't be part of the rat race when you're one of the rats who knows you're in a cage."
— Ed Brubaker

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose."
— Garrison Keillor

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

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
— Charles Bukowski

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins

"Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn."
— Benjamin Franklin

"'It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,' he said. 'Have you thought of going into teaching?'"
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"Eragon looked back at him, confused. 'I don't understand.'

'Of course you don't,' said Brom impatiently. 'That's why I'm teaching you and not the other way around....'"
— Christopher Paolini (Eragon)

"One of the greatest myths in the world - & the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies' -- is that troublesome things get less & less troublesome if you do them more & more. People say this myth when they are teaching children to ride bicycles, for instance, as though falling off a bicycle & skinning your knee is less troublesome the fourteenth time you do it than it is the first time. The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, & that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent."
— Lemony Snicket (The Ersatz Elevator)

"In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn."
— Phil Collins

"Why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want."
— Ayn Rand

"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance"
— e.e. cummings

"I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage."
— Roald Dahl

"When you learn, teach, when you get, give."
— Maya Angelou

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."
— Ambrose Bierce

"What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows."
— Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)

"The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
— Ayn Rand

"A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things-a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty."
— John Grogan (Marley & Me: Love and Life with the World's Worst Dog)

"To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it."
— Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)

"There are two types of education... One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live."
— John Adams

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."
— Aldous Huxley

"Meaning and morality of One's life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as posible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses. I can tell you how to bottle fame, brew glory, and even put a stopper in death."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

"Never try to teach a pig to sing.
It's a waste of time and besides it annoys the pig."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim."
— Linton Weeks

"I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker."
— Stanley Kubrick

"I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think"
— Socrates

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be."
— Thomas Jefferson