A - M

A

Richard Adams

Watership Down

Strawberry-
"Animals don't behave like men," he said. "If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creature's lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality."

Piers Anthony

A Spell for Chameleon

All because he had tried to rescue a beautiful, vacuous girl from a dragon. In folklore, such a hero always received a most intriguing reward. In reality, the hero was as likely as not to find himself in need of rescue…

She was beautiful, but she seemed somewhat vacuous.

Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg

Nightfall

Theremon-
"Science is constructed of approximations that gradually approach the truth..."

Assassins

Elektra

"This sparrow's flying south for the winter but he leaves too late and freezes solid. Along comes this cow and shits on him. The shit thaws him out and he's so happy to be alive that he starts to sing. A cat hears him, cleans the shit off, and eats him. The moral of the story is everybody that gets you out of shit isn't your friend, everybody that shits on you isn't your enemy, and if you're warm and happy then keep your big mouth shut."

Jane Austen

To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.

B

Lauren Bacall

Imagination is the highest kite we can fly.

Yogi Berra

You can observe a lot just by watching.

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

"I'm sorry man. My existence is just not very noble or sublime."

Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

Captain Beatty-
Fire is bright and fire is clean.
That way lies melancholy.
Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world.

Granger the Hobo-
"Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth on his ass."

"Have you ever seen the atom bomb mushroom from two hundred miles up? It's a pinprick. It's nothing. With the wilderness all around it.
My grandfather ran off the V-2 rocket film a dozen times and then hoped that someday our cities would open up and let the green and the land and the wilderness in more, to remind people that we're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be."

"There was a damn silly bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing over and over, but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation."

David Brin

Brightness Reef

Magic and art arise from an egomaniac's insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.

Alice May Brock

Tomatoes and oregano make it Iatlian; wine and taragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce make it Chinese; garlic makes it good.

H. Jackson Brown

Think big thoughts but relish smll pleasures.

Baby Talk Magazine

Shannon Brownlee

"Smile at me, baby, and I'll walk on hot coals for you, no matter how many times you wake me up in the middle of the night."

Willaim H. Bugler

There is never a better measure of what a person is, than what he does when he's absolutley free to choose.

C

Orson Scott Card

Hatrack River

"...That's what it means to be married. You fight all the time, but you never fight about what you think you're fighting about.

Mary Cassatt

Acceptance on someone else's terms is worse than rejection.

Emile Chartier

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.

Luciano Crescenzo

We are each of us angels with only one wing. And we can fly only by embracing each other.

T. Crofton Croker

The Lady of Gollerus

"I know this, that if I had the luck, or maybe the misfortune," said Dick with a melancholy smile, "to have the woman, it would not be this way with me! - and what in the wide world is a man without a wife? He's n more surely than a bottle without a drop of drink in it, or dancing without music, the left leg of a scissors, or a fishing line without a hook, or any other matter that is in no ways complete."

D

Baba Ram Dass

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Jeffrey Deaver

Praying for Sleep

"You know what I always thought about ghosts? They'd have to be naked, wouldn't they? Clothes don't have souls."

Charles Dickens

Captain Murderer and the Devil's Bargain

There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit, when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been.

E

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The American Scholar

In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he (Man) tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, a parrot of other men's thinking.

Self-Reliance

To be great is to be misunderstood;...Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every on of its members.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide.
Every shadow points to the sun.
He so would be a man must first be a non-conformist.
I like man but not men.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps the perfect sweetness of the independence of solitude.
No law can be sacred to me but that of my own intellect.
Nothing can bring peace but yourself.
The civilized man has built a coach but has lost the use of its feet.
Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string.

F

John Farris

The Fury

...Acceptance and approval are concentrated in highly structured peer groups where the rules are constantly changing, dictated by fashion, by the ... soul-destroying perversities of our merchandisers.

Pink Floyd

"Another Brick in the Wall"

We don't need no education.

Carolyn Forche

The heart is the toughest part of the body. Tenderness is in the hands.

Henry Ford

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.

M. A. Foster

The Warriors of Dawn

There is no such thing as a doctrine, a theory, or an idea which lacks the capacity and the ability to imprison the mind.

G

Karl Gerstner

What is thinking? I should have thought I would have known.

Goethe

If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay that way, but if you treat him as if he were what he could be, he will become what he could be.

H

Helen Hayes

Love is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.

Malcolm Hein

There is little room left for wisdom when one is full of judgement.

O Henry

The Cop and the Anthem

When wild geese honk of nights and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, ... you may know that winter is near at hand.

Frank Herbert

Children of Dune

The only rule governing creativity is the act of creation itself.

"Higher Learning"

African American Man

"They just hate me 'cause they ain't me."

Alice Hoffman

Books may very well be the only true magic.

"Howard's End"

In nine times out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature the other.

Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to a man. it is what a man does with what happens to him.

I

J

Juan Ramon Jimenez

If someone gives you ruled paper, write the other way.

Robert Jordan

The Eye of the World

Aram -
"The leaf lives its appointed time, and does not struggle against the wind that carries it away. The leaf does no harm, and finally falls to nourish new leaves. So it should be with all men. And women."

K

Helen Keller

Never consent to creep when you feel an impulse to soar.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.

Stephen King

Firestarter

...The world, although well-lighted with flourescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.

L

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.

Sophia Loren

Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

M

Harriet Martineau

Readers are plentiful, thinkers are rare.

Mencius

The great man is he who has not lost the heart of a child.

Barbara Michaels

Someone in the House

Human beings have an astonishing capacity to ignore what they don't want to believe.

John Stuart Mill

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people ... it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

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