"...I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."
— Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

"Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation."
— Graham Greene

"/It's/ much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine."
— Woody Allen

"I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?'"
— Margaret Mead

"Everyone is a fuckin' Napoleon."
— Ani DiFranco

"People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and...well, sometimes they can't talk about them. I know how that is."
— Silk Spectre/Laurie Juspeczyk, from Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons's The Watchmen

"Well, that's why smart people get tripped up with worry and fear. Worry...fear...is just a misuse of the creative imagination that has been placed in each of us. Because we are smart and creative, we imagine all the things that could happen, that might happen, that will happen if this or that happens. See what I mean?"
— Andy Andrews (The Noticer: Sometimes, all a person needs is a little perspective.)

"When I left Queen's my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don't know what lies around the bend, but I'm going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes--what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows--what new landscapes--what new beauties--what curves and hills and valleys further on."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"It's much easier . . . to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which... is within the souls of men."
— Black Elk

"I'm strong on the outside, not all the way through. I've never been perfect, but neither have you."
— Chester Bennington - Linkin Park

"He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS – how he put together a story about the world’s workings – that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock. (295)"
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

""...that's the way to tell a true story from a made-up one. A made-up story always has a neat and tidy end. But true stories don't end, at least until their heroes and heroines die, and not then really because the things they did and didn't do, sometimes live on.""
— Elspeth Huxley (The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood)

"It's much easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time."
— Mark Zusak

"Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still."
— David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)

"There was no mistaking her sincerity--it breathed in every tone of her voice. Both Marilla and Mrs. Lynde recognized its unmistakable ring. But the former understood in dismay that Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation--was reveling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into a species of positive pleasure."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"How sadly things had changed since she had sat there the night after coming home! Then she had been full of hope and joy and the future had looked rosy with promise. Anne felt as if she had lived years since then, but before she went to bed there was a smile on her lips and peace in her heart. She had looked her duty courageously in the face and found it a friend--as duty ever is when we meet it frankly."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"If the case isn't plea bargained, dismissed or placed on the inactive docket for an indefinite period of time, if by some perverse twist of fate it becomes a trial by jury, you will then have the opportunity of sitting on the witness stand and reciting under oath the facts of the case-a brief moment in the sun that clouds over with the appearance of the aforementioned defense attorney who, at worst, will accuse you of perjuring yourself in a gross injustice or, at best, accuse you of conducting an investigation so incredibly slipshod that the real killer has been allowed to roam free.
Once both sides have argued the facts of the case, a jury of twelve men and women picked from computer lists of registered voters in one of America's most undereducated cities will go to a room and begin shouting. If these happy people manage to overcome the natural impulse to avoid any act of collective judgement, they just may find one human being guilty of murdering another. Then you can go to Cher's Pub at Lexington and Guilford, where that selfsame assistant state's attorney, if possessed of any human qualities at all, will buy you a bottle of domestic beer.
And you drink it. Because in a police department of about three thousand sworn souls, you are one of thirty-six investigators entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world. Your paycheck may come from fiscal services but, goddammit, after six beers you can pretty much convince yourself that you work for the Lord himself. If you are not as good as you should be, you'll be gone within a year or two, transferred to fugitive, or auto theft or check and fraud at the other end of the hall. If you are good enough, you will never do anything else as a cop that matters this much. Homicide is the major leagues, the center ring, the show. It always has been. When Cain threw a cap into Abel, you don't think The Big Guy told a couple of fresh uniforms to go down and work up the prosecution report. Hell no, he sent for a fucking detective. And it will always be that way, because the homicide unit of any urban police force has for generations been the natural habitat of that rarefied species, the thinking cop."
— David Simon

"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and
understanding."
— Marshall McLuhan (The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man)

"Anne walked home very slowly in the moonlight. The evening had changed something for her. Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred. It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different--something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth."
— Lucy Maud Montgomery

"I mean that it's all right to go to bed with an asshole but don't ever have a baby with one."
— David Gilmour (The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and Son)

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
— William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Cicero 106 BC - 43 BC Attributed

"Forgetfulness is the lodging of unobtained thoughts."
— Alton Hayes