Poverty is a relatively mild disease for even a very flimsy American soul, but uselessness will kill strong and weak souls alike, and kill every time.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.

Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

If you have a definite purpose, if you have a driving desire to achieve it and if you go with passion, then don't wait for success because you are already a success.

If faculty would relax their emphasis on grades, this might serve not to lower standards but to encourage an orientation toward learning.

The quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers.

Cole, you stay right where you are. Miz has enough people at ringside tonight.

People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily, it is soon forgotten.

Death in my mind isn't a finality. There's a continuum: It's like at night, you go to sleep and in the daytime you wake up, or whenever you wake up, and it's a new day.

And you… do you know what you are?” “Stupid?” “Beautiful,” he says, his face turning red.

Literacy is freedom, and everyone has something significant to say.

I’ve had to make the difficult decision to follow my intuition, and allow myself the space and time to explore my true purpose in life.

What the world calls failure, I call learning.