"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."
— Rafael Sabatini (Scaramouche)

"To a young heart everything is fun."
— Charles Dickens

"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness."
— Aristotle

"“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.""
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Being faithful in the smallest things is the way to gain, maintain, and demonstrate the strength needed to accomplish something great."
— Alex and Brett Harris

"I intend to put up with nothing that I can put down."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all."
— John Grogan (Marley & Me: Love and Life with the World's Worst Dog)

"Do what you gotta do so you can do what you wanna do."
— Denzel Washington

""The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.""
— Mortimer J. Adler (How to Speak How to Listen)

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form."
— Albert Einstein

"What else exhausts like sustained deception?"
— Leif Enger

"She had a wattle and an enormous middle-aged ass that challenged all chairs."
— Junot Diaz

"The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women."
— Booker T. Washington

""I see you're looking at my cuff buttons."
I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now."
— Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

"Good authors worry about genres great authors don't."
— Frank Gaspar

"I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldn't leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and then, and stick the point into me."
— Charles Dickens

"
Elder's Meditation of the Day - February 18
"laughter is a necessity in life that does not cost much, and the Old Ones say that one of the greatest healing powers in our life is the ability to laugh."
--Larry P. Aitken, CHIPPEWA
Laughter is a good stress eliminator. Laughter causes healing powers to be distributed through our bodies. Laughter helps heal relationships that are having problems. Laughter can change other people. Laughter can heal the sick. Laughter is spiritual. One of the greatest gifts among Indian people has been our ability to laugh. Humor is natural to Indian people. Sometimes the only thing left to do is laugh.

Great Spirit, allow me to laugh when times get tough.


"
— Larry P. Aitken (Two Cultures Meet: Pathways for American Indians to Medicine)

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Mute in that golden silence hung with green,
Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyes
Remembrance of all beauty that has been,
And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
"
— Siegfried Sassoon (Counter-Attack and Other Poems)

"Here my sister, after a fit of clappings and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down - which were the last stages on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect fury and a complete success, she made a dash to the door"
— Charles Dickens

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better"
— Sammy Buckett

"Memory is a magpie after chips of colored glass and ribbon rather than the upright accuracy of objective sequence."
— Larry Woiwode

"So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed ofr the sake of the people whom we most despise."
— Charles Dickens

"The rosaries cabling through La Inca's fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman's hands."
— Junot Diaz

"Art Matthews shot himself, loudly and messily, in front of the parade grounds at Dunstable Races."
— Dick Francis, Dead Cert

"I suppose he smiled at Cody - he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name)"
— Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

"As for Tom, the fact that he "had some woman in New York" was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart."
— Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

"They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together."
— Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

"and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove"
— Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him"
— Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

"I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth."
— Nick Carraway - The Great Gatsby

"In all my past life I have done nothing either great or good."
— Patrick Branwell Brontë

""Don't do something great unless it is great for the greater good""
— YaYa Sun

"We exist temporarily through what we take, but we live forever through what we give. "
— P. Lawson

"Ma studied him. Her hand went blindly out and put the little bag of sugar on the pile in her arm. "Thanks to you," she said quietly. She started for the door, and when she reached it, she turned about. "Learnin' it all the time, ever' day. If you're in trouble or hurt or need - go to poor people. They're the only one's that'll help - the only ones." The screen door slammed shut behind her."
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)