[On Thomas Babington Macaulay:] He was a most disagreeable companion to my fancy ... His conversation was a procession of one.

Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses....we must be learning all of our lives.

Nursing is a progressive art such that to stand still is to go backwards.

The most important practical lesson than can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe.

Nature alone cures. ... what nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.

I attribute my success to this - I never gave or took any excuse.

The very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm.

I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

if you think you know all that somebody knows, you shall least know all that somebody knows. If you think you least know all that somebody knows, you shall really know all that somebody knows.

I bought a backscrabber. One more reason to have no need for a relationship.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

When I got this role, my daughter Molly said, 'Dad, you've come full circle.

Music is meaningless noise unless it touches a receiving mind.

Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.

I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.

I'm sorry, but any police department in America that tries to function without some form of 'stop and frisk,' or whatever terminology they use, is doomed to failure. It's that simple.