Quotes

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"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."
-Mark Twain

"You can tell the true character of a man by the way he treats those who can do nothing for him."
-Anonymous (Lisa Read)

"We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
-Joseph Campbell

"The journey's the thing."
-Anonymous

"We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
-Anonymous

"We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time."
-TS Elliot

"What if the goal of life is not to prevail, but simply to learn?"
-Carol Pearson

"The heart has reasons that reason does not understand."
-Blaise Pascal

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
-Mark Twain

"When it's dark enough, you can see the stars."
-Unknown

"Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."
-Nelson Mandela

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages."
-William Shakespeare, As You Like It

MRS. BENTON
"Your talent is God's gift to you, what you do with it is your gift to God."

-Mrs. Benton (Beah Richards), "ER" (written by John Wells)

"I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
-Martin Luther King Jr.

HARRIS
"A kiss may not always be the truth, but it is what we wish were true."

-Harris (Steve Martin), "LA Story" (screenplay by Steve Martin)

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of our art."
-Henry James

"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for."
-Socrates

"One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it."
-Gaston Bachelard

JOEL
"Sometimes you just gotta say, "What the fuck?"

-Joel (Tom Cruise), "Risky Business" (screenplay by Paul Brickman)

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined."
-Thoreau

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
-Richard Bachman

KEATING
"Seize the day boys. Make your lives extraordinary."

-John Keating (Robin Williams), "Dead Poet's Society" (screenplay by Tom Schulman)

"Some days you get the bear [sigh], and some days the bear gets you..."
-My Film Studies professor

RICKY
"Sometimes I see so much beauty in the world in the world, I can hardly stand it."

-Ricky (Wes Bentley), "American Beauty" (screenplay by Alan Ball)

"Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."
-RD Laing

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader."
-Robert Frost

MIKE
"I'm saying if we're going to go out we shouldn't just drive around we should do something."

CYNTHIA
"Yeah you're right man. I'm gonna just, you know, get drunk, maybe get laid, or get in a fight."

MIKE
"No I'm serious man. We should be up for anything."

CYNTHIA
"I know. We are. But what? I mean, God. Don't you ever feel like everything we do and everything we've been taught is just to service the future."

TONY
"Yeah, I know. It's like it's all preparation."

CYNTHIA
"Right, but what are we preparing ourselves for?"

MIKE
"Death."

TONY
"Life at the party. It's true."

CYNTHIA
"You know, but that's valid, because if we're all going to die anyway shouldn't we be enjoying ourselves now? You know, I'd like to quit think of the present, like right now as some minor insignificant pre-amble to something else."

TONY
"Exactly. That's what everybody in this car needs. Some good old worth-while visceral experience."

--Mike (Adam Goldberg), Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi), and Tony (Anthony Rapp), "Dazed and Confused" (screenplay by Richard Linkletter)

GUY IN BATHROOM
"Pain is temporary, film is forever."

-"Three O'Clock High" (screenplay by Richard Christian Matheson & Thomas Szollosi)

BATTY
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

-Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), "Blade Runner" (screenplay by Hampton Fancher & David Peoples)

JOEY
"The people that can hurt you the most are the people that you love the most."
-Anonymous

"...And once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you long to return..."
-Leonardo da Vinci

"He who fights monsters must be careful that he himself does not become one. As you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you."
-Nietzsche

"If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."
-Thomas Edison

KEATING
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman: "O me, o life of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish. What good amid these, o me, o life? Answer: that you are here. That life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?"

-John Keating (Robin Williams), "Dead Poet's Society" (screenplay by Tom Schulman)

"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
-Mark Twain

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
-Mark Twain

"While there is time, let's go out and feel everything."
-Steve Winwood (Scott Johnson)

"You must never miss an opportuntiy to tell these people how much they mean to you."
-Frasier (Kelsy Grammer) on friendship, "Cheers" final episode, May 20, 1993

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstorus laws have made monstorus and unlawful."
-Oscar Wilde

"Music goes on forever."
-Bob Marley

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds."
-Bob Marley

"I don't know about you, but I intend to have my kicks before the whole fucking shithouse explodes."
-Jim Morrison

"The earth has music for those who listen."
-Anonymous

GORDIE
"I never had friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve."

-Gordie in "Stand By Me" (screenplay by Stephen King (story), Raynold Gideon & Bruce A. Evans)

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

"Only with passion can we be original."
-Anonymous

"I'd rather laugh with the sinners, than cry with the saints, the sinners are much more fun."
-Billy Joel (Jason Fricker)

YODA
"You must unlearn what you have learned."

-Yoda (Frank Oz) to Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), "Return of the Jedi" (screenplay George Lucas & Lawrence Kasdan)

"In fear of being mediocre, I did the unexpected."
-Anonymous

"If you get confused, just listen to the music play."
-Grateful Dead/Robert Hunter, "Franklin's Tower"

VADER
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

-Darth Vader (David Prowse/James Earl Jones) in "Star Wars" (screenplay by George Lucas)

"Well, I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before."
-Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn"

"Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That's all it was: just curiosity."
-Jim Morrison, Los Angeles 1969

"Youth is wasted on the young."
-Ronnie Winch

"Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness."
-Wallace Stegner (Sara Hoffman)

"Consider your birthright. Think who you are. You were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge."
-Wallace Stegner

"Their loyalties were neither national nor regional nor political nor religious, but tribal."
-Wallace Stegner

"We corroborated some transcendental faith of theirs that the oversoul roof leaked on all alike."
-Wallace Stegner

LLOYD
"I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen."

-Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack), "Say Anything" (screenplay Cameron Crowe)

KEVIN
"In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king."

-Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage), "The Wonder Years"

"We all move on the fringes of eternity and are sometimes granted vistas through the fabric of illusion."
-Ansel Adams

"Your home is a pleasant place from which you draw happiness."
-T-Shirt slogan seen in Valley Mall, Harrisonburg, Virginia

"The West is the Best."
-Jim Morrison

"Sometimes the embers are better than the flame."
-Stephen King

"Every man dies. Not every man really lives."
-Braveheart Tag

WILLIAM
"Well, it was fun."

LESTER BANGS
"They make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You are not "cool".

WILLIAM
"I know. Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn't."

LESTER BANGS
"That's because we are uncool! And while women will always be a problem for guys like us, most of the great art in the world is about that very problem. Good-looking people have no spine! Their art never lasts! They get the girls, but we're smarter."

WILLIAM
"I can really see that now."

LESTER BANGS
"Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love... and let's face it, you got a big head start."

WILLIAM
"I'm glad you were home."

LESTER BANGS
"I'm always home! I'm uncool!"

WILLIAM
"Me too!"

LESTER BANGS
"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."

-William (Patrick Fugit) and Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), "Almost Famous" (screenplay by Cameron Crowe)

SUPERMAN
"I wish you could all see the world how I see it."

-Superman (Christopher Reeve), "Superman IV" (screenplay by)

"Sure, the weight of the medal felt good in my hand, but it didn't mean much... That life, I decided, was not for me."
-Jenny Hung, High School Senior, in an amazing article on life, Newsweek, September 20, 1999

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
-Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

"It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.""
-Anonymous

INIGO
"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

-Inigo Montoya (actor), The Princess Bride (screenplay by William Goldman)

"Aim low and you'll never be dissapointed."
-Duffy

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
-Oscar Wilde

"Only the shallow know themselves."
-Oscar Wilde

"It's a good idea to keep your words soft and sweet, because you never know when you'll have to eat them."
-Alfred E. Neuman

"There is no enlightenment without ignorance first."
-Anonymous

"Figure lie and liars figure."
-Anonymous

"...drowning in chocolate."
-Jude Law

"It's easy to quote people you're in love with. Everything they say is cute."
-Anonymous

"Everything that's meant to happen, happens."
-Anonymous

"Time heals all wounds." CHECK ARCHIVE
-Anonymous

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers."
-Anonymous

RICHARD
"When you develop an infatuation for someone, you always find a reason to believe that this is exactly the person for you. It doesn't need to be a good reason, a bad one will do just as well. Taking photographs of the night sky, for example: in the long run that's just the kind of dumb irritating habit that would cause you to split up. But at the time - it's the charming eccentricity you've been searching for all these years."

-Richard (Leonardo Dicaprio) in "The Beach" (screenplay by John Hodge, based on the novel by Alex Garland)

"Love is friendship set on fire."
-Anonymous

ACE
"Funny how they always wanna be friends after they rip your guts out."

-Ace (Jake Busey) in "Starship Troopers" (screenplay by Ed Neumeier)

WESLEY
"As you wish."

-Wesley (Cary Elweys) in "The Princess Bride" (screenplay by William Goldman)

"For the sake of love alone, would I walk through fire again."
-Anonymous

"The cow manure flies always congregate at the cow manure."
-Anonymous

"A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from the bristles."
-Anonymous

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see; Saw the Vision of the World, and all the wonder that could be..."
-Alfred Tennyson

"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."
-Mark Twain

"What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens."
-Thaddeus Golas

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
-George Eliot

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I... I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
-Robert Frost

"I've learned - that you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up to them.
I've learned - that no matter how much I care, some people just don't care back.
I've learned - that it takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it."
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

"Time is the best teacher, but it kills all of its students."
-Unknown

"As the sun sets slowly in the west we bid a fond farewell to all the friends we've made - and, with a touch of melancholy, we look forward to the time when we will all be together again."
-Clarence Worley

"Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
("It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: what is essential is invisible to the eye.")
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

"There is no hope of joy except in human relations."
-Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses."
-MC Esher

"What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story, And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams."
-Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Life is a Dream

"The world is as you see it."
-Hindu Scripture

"Journeys end in lovers meeting."
-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III.

"What we see is mainly what we look for."
-Anonymous

"A goal without a plan is a dream."
-Anonymous

"No one knows anything."
-William Goldman

"Art is the elimination of the unnecessary."
-Picasso

"There'd be nothing to frighten you if you refused to be afraid."
-Gandhi (Kim Doe)

"Nobody understands the world they're in, but some people are better off at it than others."
-Richard Feynman

"Once in a while you can get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look at it right."
-The Grateful Dead, "Scarlet Begonias"

"Some people make the world a better place just by being in it..."
-Anonymous

"Your soul suffers if you live superficially."
-Albert Schweitzer

"What we really are matters more than what other people think of us."
-Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian Statesman (1889-1964)

"This world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
-Horace Walpole

"Count your age with friends but not with years."
-Anonymous

"You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime."
-Dale Carnegie

"Sometimes, the true test of genius is something that most people don't get or understand."
-Anonymous

"Nothing is as it seems."
-Anonymous

"There is a flame that never dies. Even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise."
-Les Miserables

"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nicole's thoughts, in Tender is the Night, Book 3, Chapter 7

"You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her."
-Anonymous

"She had hair like summer, and a voice like 3 a.m."
-Kyle Smith, Love Monkey

"One must never look for happiness, one meets it along the way."
-Isabelle Eberhardt

"Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye."
-H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"You aren't truly living until you find something worth dying for."
-Anonymous

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else."
-Anonymous

"Notice where you're standing when you watch the rehearsal... and then put the camera there."
-Steven Spielberg

"Film is not created in a vacuum. Rather, it results from a combination of forces and personalities, coupled with limitations of time, budget, and technology, which all converge in a way that is unique to a moment in time."
-Robert Wise

"They say that history repeats itself... Then again, they've said that before..."
-Kevin Nealon, Saturday Night Live

HOMER
"It takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."

-Homer (Dan Castellaneta) in "The Simpsons" (teleplay by x)

MELVIN
"Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here."

-Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) in "As Good As It Gets" (screenplay by Mark Andrus & James L. Brooks)

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you become great."
-Mark Twain

"In the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
-Oscar Wilde

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy."
-Shakespeare, Hamlet

"I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people."
-John Lennon

"There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer for them, or turn them into literature."
-Stephen Stills

"We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
-Henry James

"God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another."
-William Shakespeare

"Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of defeating himself."
-Anonymous

"He who appeases the alligator gets eaten last."
-Anonymous

"Leaving can sometimes be the best way to never go away."
-Cathy N. Davidson

"I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer..."
-Rainer Maria Rilke (Beth Berger)

"The past is a voluptuous siren. It engenders the strong undertow of a low tide. We must grasp the present well or the past will drag us down an absorb us."
-Jose Ortega y Gasset

"The one thing of value in the world of value is the active soul -- free, sovereign, unencumbered. This every man is entitled to, although in most it is obstructed and is yet unborn."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (Dan Eldon)

"A truly intelligent man is one who has strong convictions, but is willing to change those convictions, when faced with irrefutable evidence."
-Albert Einstein

"The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear."
-Herbert Agate

"The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen... and stupidity."
-Harlan Ellison

"If you allowed Hollywood to infect your soul... not your brain, not even your heart, but your soul... you became vulnerable to the shiv in which Hollywood could kill you."
-Joe Eszterhas

"Crazy" is a term of art: "Insane" is a term of Law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble."
-Hunter S. Thompson

"Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt."
-William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)

"It is very hard for a writer to process and understand that their writing is not truly competitive. 99.4% of aspiring writers will never have a career. That doesn't mean writing is a bad idea. It means delaying your life until you're a successful writer is a bad idea."
-Tao

"A hint for would-be moviemakers: for a great movie you need to define the world first, then the characters, and then what happens."
-John Lassiter

HANK SCORPIO
"Homer, on your way out-if you wanna kill somebody it would help me a lot."

-Hank Scorpio (Albert Brooks) in "The Simpsons: You Only Live Twice" (teleplay by John Swartzwelder)

"When a father gives to his son, they both laugh. When a son gives to his father, they both cry."
-Yiddish Proverb

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

"Some say the end is near. Some say we'll see armageddon soon. I certainly hope we will. I sure could use a vacation from this bullshit, three ringed circus sideshow of freaks here in this hopeless fucking hold we call L.A. The only way to fix it is to flush it all away."
-Anonymous

"Go without a coat when it's cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it's all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you're made of and what you're capable of. If you're never tested, you'll never define your character.""
-Anonymous

BRAD
"Man, I'm just waiting for the fun to start!"

-Brad Hamilton (Judge Reinhold) in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (screenplay by Cameron Crowe)

"When you watch a movie, you don't want to feel like a machine made it. You want to feel a soul."

-Alexander Payne

"The perfect film is the silent film, just as the perfect sequence is the silent sequence. Dialogue is inferior to picture in telling a film story. A picture, first, as we know, is worth a thousand words; the juxtaposition of pictures is geometrically more effective. If a director or writer wants to find out if a scene works, he may remove the dialogue and see if he can still communicate the idea to the audience."
-David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla

"It must be hard to live in Hollywood and just have to sit. I've had to sit a lot in New York, but it's different. There's something about Los Angeles; maybe it's why I've never lived there, because the downtime can be very anxious. I mean, I suppose if I liked to play tennis, or golf, or going hiking or whatever. But I don't. And New York is the perfect place to, you know, to have time on your hands."
-Christopher Walken in Premiere Magazine, July/August 2004

"A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled."
-Raymond Chandler (1888 - 1959)

"You see these romantic movies, and they are so full of deceit. As a man, you watch these things that are just so corrosive for anyone to think that their relationship should be like this. It's like smoking crack. It makes you feel good while you do it, but then it leaves you completely dissatisfied when you're left with reality."
-Ethan Hawke in Premiere Magazine, July/August 2004

"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor."
-Victor Hugo

"People spend their lives wanting things they shouldn't. The world confuses them into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn't belong. All it takes to be happy is to love the right things, in the right amounts. Not money. Not books. People. Adults who don't understand that never feel fulfilled. I don't want you to turn out like that."
-Tom's mother in The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwel & Dustin Thomason

"Love is the only perfect fisherman, the one who casts the broadest net, which no fish can escape. His reward is to sit alone in the tavern of life, forever a boy among men, hoping someday to tell stories about the one who got away."
-Tom in The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwel & Dustin Thomason

"Hope, Paul said to me once, which whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion... It's a law of motion, a fact of physics that Charlie could name, no different from the stages of white dwarfs and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our seperation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years."
-Tom in The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwel & Dustin Thomason

"I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself."
-Angelina Jolie

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
-Jack London

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
-Oscar Wilde

"It's grand when the rain in life can be thought of as elixir for the flowers and not poison for the sun."
-Erisreq

"In a world that is so cold, you need good friends to keep you warm."
-Scott Johnson

"All I know is that talent is a lightning rod and America is a thunderstorm. You go running around like crazy, you get soaked, your arm gets tired holding that damn thing up... and still, lightning, all too often, strikes half a block over, electrifying someone else."
-Stephen King

"At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night."
-HP Lovecraft

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
-Ray Bradbury

""What really knocks me out is a book that, when you�re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."
-JD Salinger

"The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world... Are the ones who do."
-Anonymous

"Let the world change you, and you can change the world."
-Anonymous

"If you're in a crowded situation that could turn into a riot (after the Red Sox have won the World Series, for example) and women aren't flashing their breasts, get out of there. I don't know if exposed breasts reflect a crowd's collective feeling or if the presence of breasts assuages a crowd's temper, but I do know this: No tits is trouble."
-Dan McAllister in Esquire Magazine's "What I've Learned" column.

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."
-Sir J.M. Barrie

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."
-Henry David Thoreau.

"The Minotaur accepts this temporary blessing for all it's worth. There are few things that he knows, these among them: that it is inevitable, even necessary, for a creature half man and half bull to walk the face of the earth; that in the numbing span of eternity even the most monstrous among us needs love; that the minutiae of life sometimes defers to folly; that even in the most tedious unending life there comes, occasionally, hope. One simply has to wait and be ready."
-Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

"For those that are nonintimates, let me explain. When the red light goes on in the window of the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Shop in Charlotte, it signals the arrival of a fresh new batch of doughnuts - hot, irresistable, unspeakable delicious, almost narcotic in their addictive quality. Combine the sweetness of spun sugar with the texture of a cumulus cloud, add just a hint of a warm summer evening's breeze, and you'll have some vague idea of the salvitary ecstasy. This is soul food indeed. Many a time Steve and I have seen that red light blink on as we've driven by and as if some posthypnotic suggestion had been triggered, found ourselves floating almost disembodied into the shop's divinely scented interior, there to be greeted by Reba the waitress, an angel without disguise who ministers instantly to our diabetic longings. We don't mess with the fancy doughnuts, the jelly-filled, the candy-sprinkled, or the custard oozing kinds. We are purists - glazed, only glazed. The ones with that sweet crusty frosting as transparent as morning sunlight. Reba knows without asking that Steve wants two and I - well, of course, Old Harv wants four. These are not so much eaten as laid reverently on the tongue and allowed to melt there, doused down with long drafts of tongue-singering coffee, essential antidote to the doughnuts' teeth-cracking sweetness. Ahhhhh..."
-Harvey Arden, Travels in a Stone Canoe

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke

"If all mankind could look through that telescope," he said that night, "it would change the world."
-Col. Griffith J. Griffith ([founder] "of a world-class observatory for the people of Los Angeles, allowing the masses a glimpse of the heavens.")

"Why are we telling this story? �Why does it have to be told now?"
-Joss Whedon

"Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods."
-Aristotle

"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?"
-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."
-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

"The best love affairs are those we never had."
-Norman Lindsey

"Hearts will never be practible until they can be made unbreakable."
-Frank Morgan as Professor Marvel, The Wizard of Oz

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
-Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

"Life is but a dream."
-excerpt from Row, Row, Row Your Boat

"No, seriously. Who let the fucking dogs out?"
-T-shirt slogan