Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Wisława Szymborska On Possibilities
Maria Wisława Anna Symborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012) I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer …
Marjane Satrapi On Images
Marjane Satrapi (November 22, 1969 -) Image is an international language. The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing. That appeared much before the alphabet. And when you draw a situation — someone is scared or angry or happy — it means the same thing in all cultures. You cannot draw someone …
Susan Minot On Becoming A Writer
Susan Minot (December 07, 1956 -) One of the reasons I became a writer is that I had to go into a room and sit down in order to know what was going on in my head.
Kenneth Patchen On Love And Rebellion
Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972) It's always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to give a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do.
Rebecca Solnit On Lies And Language
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that …
Chris Van Allsburg On Christmas Magic
Chris Van Allsburg (June 18, 1949 -) At one time most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed, it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I've grown old, the bell still rings for me as it …
Anaïs Nin On Dreams
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
Pico Iyer On Travel
Pico Iyer (February 11, 1957 -) We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of …
Henry David Thoreau On Living
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) ...I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I come to die discover that I had not lived. …
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn On Revelations
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008) Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words...to revelations unattainable by reason. It is like that small mirror in fairy tales—you glance in it and what you see is not yourself; for an instance you glimpse the inaccessible, where no …
Samuel Johnson On Hope
Samuel Johnson (September 18, 1709 – December 13,1784) Hope itself is a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords; but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain.
Ursula K Le Guin On The Future
Ursula K Le Guin (October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018) Anything at all can be said to happen [in the future] without fear of contradiction from a native. The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in, a means of thinking about reality, a method.
Elizabeth Acevedo On Belonging
Elizabeth Acevedo I walk through the world with a chip in my shoulder. I go into so many spaces where I feel like I have to prove that I’m allowed to be in that place.
Isabel Allende On Story Telling
Isabel Allende (August 02, 1942 -) The values and principles that sustain our civilization are under siege. If we listen to another person’s story, if we tell our own story, we start to heal from division and hatred.
Marge Piercy On The End Of Days
Marge Piercy (March 31, 1936 -) Almost always with cats, the end comes creeping over the two of you— she stops eating, his back legs no longer support him, she leans to your hand and purrs but cannot rise—sometimes a whimper of pain although they are stoic. They see death clearly though hooded eyes. Then …
Douglas Adams On The Journey
Douglas Adams ( March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001) I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Henry Miller On Aging
Henry Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) The nearer I get to the grave the more time I have to waste. Nothing is important now, in the sense it once was. I can lean to the right or left, without danger of capsizing. I can go off the course, too, if I wish, …
Authur Rimbaud On My Bohemian Life
Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 – November 10, 1891) I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets; My overcoat too was becoming ideal; I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal; Oh dear me! what marvelous loves I dreamed of! My only pair of breeches had a big whole …
Meghan O’Rourke On Love
Meghan O’Rourke (1976 -) The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
Jeanette Winterson On Artists
Jeanette Winterson (August 27, 1959 -) [For the artist] it is a question of always going back and uncovering what is already there because the artist is something of a dredger: you have to let down your net and pull up things from the mud, from the silt, that are unrecognizable, that have been forgotten, …
David Foster Wallace On Reading
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) The fun of reading is an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about.
Aldous Huxley On Appetites Of The Soul
Aldous Huxley (July 26 1894 – November 22, 1963) That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with artificial paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives that at worst seem so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited, that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves …
Cheryl Strayed On Voice
Cheryl Strayed (September 17, 1968 -) When you're speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice.
Jiddu Krishnamurti On Killing
Jiddu Krishnamurti (May 11, 1895 – February 17, 1986) But apparently man loves to kill things, the fleeting deer, the marvelous gazelle, and the great elephant. We love to kill each other. This killing of other human beings has never stopped throughout the history of man's life on this earth. If we could, and we …
Ralph Ellison On The Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was …
Kieren Perkins On Barriers
Kieren Perkins (August 14, 1973 -) It is not so much about overcoming the barriers other people place in front of you as it is about overcoming the barriers we place in front of ourselves.
Alan Watts On The Ego
Alan Watts (January 06, 1915 – November 16, 1973) We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body – a center …
Wendell Berry On How To Be A Poet
Wendell Berry (August 05, 1934 -) (to remind myself) Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill – more of each than you have – inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. …
David Whyte On Home
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) This is the bright home in which I live, this is where I ask my friends to come, this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love.
Eckhard Tolle On Time
Eckhard Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) To be free of time is to be free of the psychological need of the past for your identity and the future for your fulfillment. It represents the most profound transformation of consciousness that you can imagine. To realize this truth, you need to live it. When every cell …
