"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Complete Prose Works Of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
— George Macaulay Trevelyan

"The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real."
— Todd Strasser

"So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs."
— Elbert Hubbard (Elbert Hubbard's Scrap Book)

"A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself."
— Kate Braestrup (Here If You Need Me: A True Story)

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part."
— Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters)

"She believes poetry is 'a way of coming to know the realness of things; fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships; nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind."
— Nancy Bunge

"Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them. "
— Ishmael Beah (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier)

"I am six years old and instead of celebrating with birthday cakes, I chew on a piece of charcoal. "
— Loung Ung

"I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it. "
— Loung Ung (First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers)

"On previous trips the pirates have stolen valuables, killed people, raped and abducted girls...the women work frantically to ugly themselves up by smearing black charcoal paste on their faces and bodies. With ashen faces, some of the younger, prettier girls reach into the bags we have vomited into and scoop out handfuls of it to smear on their hair and clothes. "
— Loung Ung (First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers)

"There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill. "
— Pete Earley (Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness)

"We insist no one be compelled to take antipsychotic drugs until he becomes so deranged that he is in 'imminent danger' and a judge has to intervene to save his life. If we really believed that forced treatment was an injustice and forced medication was cruel, then why would we allow a judge to impose it as a last resort to save a life? "
— Pete Earley (Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness)

"Many of the members of the class had never held ice. "
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

""If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music." "
— Kurt Vonnegut

"But while Sasha told us that in America even the most successful men can have but one wife at once--my father had six--and talked about escalators, indoor plumbing, and the various laws of the land, he did not warn us that I would be told by American teenagers that I should go back to Africa. "
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"We ate, if we were fortunate, a spoonful of food each day. We drank as much water as we could keep in our cupped hands.
The dying began on the fifth day. "
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)

"For outdoors, he wears a mantle fastened at the shoulder with a clasp or chain; although buttons are sometimes used for decoration, the buttonhole has not been invented. "
— Joseph Gies (Life in a Medieval City)

"‘I was alone. I was covered in mud and goat blood. I’d lost my luggage. I didn’t speak the local language. I hadn’t had a meal for days, but I felt surprisingly good.’"
— Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time)

"At mealtime a very broad cloth is laid on the trestle table in the solar. to facilitate service, places are set along one side only. On that side the cloth falls to the floor, doubling as a communal napkin...there are several kinds of knives...but no forks."
— Joseph Gies (Life in a Medieval City)

"...beggars were permitted to enter great houses and solicit directly from the table, but now they are restricted to the doorstep. "
— Joseph Gies (Life in a Medieval City)

"I’m playing catch with Nisha and Nena. They’re standing against the opposite wall shrieking with enjoyment. They’re teenagers, but they’ve never played catch before and lack any sense of coordination; when they throw the ball to me it flies in any direction. Sometimes it hits the wall behind them. We’ve been playing for half an hour and they have only caught it twice.”"
— Louise Brown (The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District)

"As the baby grows bigger, she [wet nurse] will chew his meat for him."
— Joseph Gies (Life in a Medieval City)

"Instrumental keys [on organs], introduced in the twelfth century, are so heavy and stiff that they must be played with clenched fists. "
— Joseph Gies (Life in a Medieval City)

"Another of them died last night. His body was in the bazaar this morning. It lay, with a collecting bowl at its feet, on the charpoy that is reserved for those who die without money or family to bury them. He looked desiccated and his skin had the sheen and color of the dates we eat to break our fast. There are new bodies on that charpoy every week. "
— Louise Brown (The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District)

"Across the bottom of the last page of many a book is written 'Explicit, Deo Gratias ('Finished, thank god')...Books are kept not on open shelves, but in locked chests. "
— Joseph Gies (Life in a Medieval City)

"a raped girl is bad for the family: it shows that they can’t protect their women; that they have little social standing; and that they’re not respectable. It’s worse for the victim because once a woman, or a girl—or a boy—is known as the target of a rape she becomes so despised, so shamed, so worthless that she turns into public property. No one is raped only once."
— Louise Brown (The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District)

"Stop the B.S. (BLocking Your Spirit) and Start Living a Life You Love!"
— Natasha Munson

""Friendship is greater than the colonial and dominating race ideologies of hundreds of years." -"Some of My Best Friends""
— Luis Rodriguez

"When he was very excited, [John Singer] Sargent would rush at his canvas with his brush poised for attack, yelling, 'Demons, demons, demons!' When he was particularly angry or frustrated, he expressed these feelings with 'Damn,' the only curse he allowed himself. He once had the expletive inscribed on a rubber stamp so he could have the satisfaction of pounding it on a piece of paper."
— Deborah Davis (Strapless)

"Curiously, anatomical reality in art was apparently a horrifying concept to the same men and women who lined up to see bodies at the morgue. "
— Deborah Davis