I don't talk ill about people I don't know, " said Bartleby. "I only disparage them in silence and hope they die.

All the friends in the world are in the fountain of a pen.

My face is rather like a collision waiting to happen: head-on I can be borne, but turn sideways, and it is all calamity.

Swearing is a currency the countryside spends well.

No one needs Independence. We all just need tea and air conditioners.

The old who refuse to die merely on principle live on forever, to hate life and complain of all the things they could have been spared had they the good sense to die young.

We come by aurora, with a heavy and sovereign tread, with the might of matriarchs to furnish our shoulders, with the apricity of light to crown our heads

And the matron sighed over the destiny of ladies in good society, whose moral judgement led them to love unabashedly and whose depravity led them to pay for it.

The greatest ugliness in the world is seeing so beautiful a creature spoil themselves on stupidity.

The skies gave way to the full ascendence of morning and clouds skittered across the expanse, the variations on a nebulous theme woven on a celestial loom.

Attracting musicians is rather like inviting flies over to tea: they are tolerable for half an hour, but when they begin to touch the food, you either wish they would go home or die.

Piracy n: commerce without its folly-swaddles - just as God made it.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Too often, nonprofits are viewed as rigid and bureaucratic - less nimble and capable of adapting in this fluid environment than our corporate counterparts. I don't agree.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

In the '70s, everybody was doing drugs, so long as you showed up and did your work, they'd use you until you died.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to live in California because I liked skateboarding.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

I want to serve. I want to serve the people. I want every girl, every child, to be educated.

Truth was a tool. It should never simply be said. No, it had to be bent, twisted, colored, until it became a weapon.

The greed for fruit misses the flower.