William Nicholson

We read to know that we are not alone.

Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn fast.

Today begins my walk with you. Where you go, I go. Where you stay, I stay. When you sleep, I will sleep. When you rise, I will rise. I will pass my days within the sound of your voice, and my nights within the reach of your hand. And none shall come between us. 

I am as I am. The world is as it is. Whether I am content with that has very little to do with it.

Here I am going to say something which may come as a bit of a shock. God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.

He accepted what each moment brough him, and never troubled himself with matters that were outside his control.

The English seem to think drinking wine is like committing adultery, something you do rarely and abroad.

If you die, I'll die.'
'But is you live, I'll live.

Elbert Hubbard

A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Never explain―your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.

I believe in the hands that work, in the brains that think, and in the hearts that love...I believe in sunshine, fresh air, friendship, calm sleep, beautiful thoughts.

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

Sarah Dunant

The Devil may take the reckless, but the good will surely die of boredom. Boredom and frustration.

But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.

Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all. And I had noticed him, as he had me. God help us.

So if we could not have love, my husband and I, then at least I could have alchemy.

She is only a young woman who did not want to become a nun. The world is full of them.

Ambassadors, of course, do not blush. It is a requisite of the job that they can sustain any manner of insult without any visible change at all to their face."

There have been none like us before. And there will be none afterwards. Be careful what you write.

Johannes Burchard. The only man in Rome whose face remains the same be it perfume or shit under his nose.

Peter F. Hamilton

You cannot impose ideologies on people who do not embrace it wholeheartedly.

You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way. 

Sometimes you have to do what’s wrong in order to do what’s right.

This is the age of total digitalisation; everything is online always.'
'Uh huh, and that's why our politicians are pure and clean, and the world works so well, is it? Because everybody knows everything and there's no hiding place.

How you humans survive so much experience is something I shall never understand. To do so much and react to it all in the way you do is as much a curse as a blessing. You never take time to digest and appreciate what happens to you.

How many twenty-second-century bureaucrats did it take to change a light panel?
We'll have a sub-committee meeting and get back to you with an estimate.

The military do so love shiny new technology, there's always so many ways to abuse it.

But to have dreamed the dream is to have flown above the mountains so high in all but deed.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
Oh let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

What I do is me, for that I came.

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

ELECTED Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring-
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

Thornton Wilder

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

Daphne du Maurier

But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.

If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.

Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.

I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.

I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.

Men are simpler than you imagine my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

I have no talent for making new friends, but oh such genius for fidelity to old ones.

Because I want to; because I must; because now and forever more this is where I belong to be.

Mark Helprin

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.

If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.

Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.

Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.

Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.

Caleb Carr

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.

Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.

She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.  

The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves "New York Society.

Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.

Erskine Caldwell

Our chairman likes to thank each donor personally for their support on their birthday … would you like to share yours?

Fernando, I have been told that one of your chapters deals with Bierce’s experiences in Mexico as he joins Pancho Villa’s military forces. I don’t want to read it, and I won’t read it, because I’m preparing a whole novel on the very same topic, on which I’ve been working for a while.

The ladies love this one, tickets are usually sold out two years in advance ... The work we’re doing on facial reconstruction is very popular, but our more visionary donors are into cloning and cryonic preservation

Getting an audience is hard. Sustaining an audience is hard. It demands a consistency of thought, of purpose, and of action over a long period of time.

Given that many ‘cocktail origin’ stories are pure folklore, as are many of the legends associated with Hemingway, the chances of fabrication or embellishment are greatly enhanced with this one ... but I am willing to believe that he did invent this; after all, he loved the drink’s components

We’re full of angels, but you shouldn’t try to overdo it, be­cause a person can get turned off very easily if they think everyone is coming to the same well.