Patricia Cornwell

Do no harm and leave the world a better place than you found it.

Rain slowly slides down the glass as if the night is crying.

I wouldn't want to assume that all men are like you. If I did, I know I would give them up entirely.

The dead have never bothered me. It's the living that I fear.

Survival my only hope. Success my only revenge.

Grief was like a seizure that shook me like a storm.

You have to live where you wake up, even if someone else dreamed you there.

You artists think you’re the only ones who can relate to these things. Many of us have the same feelings, the same emptiness, the same loneliness. But we don’t have the tools to verbalize them. So we carry on, we struggle. Feelings are feelings. I think people’s feelings are pretty much the same all over the world

What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?

Life brings with it strangeness and surprises and upset.

Frank McCourt

You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.

He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live.

Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.

I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words.

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

After a full belly all is poetry

It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen.

Harry Frankfurt

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Mary Roach

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.

Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

John Berendt

Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.

If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, "What's your business?" In Macon they ask, "Where do you go to church?" In Augusta they ask your grandmother's maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is "What would you like to drink?

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.

Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.

Loneliness is not being alone, It's loving others to no avail.

Lisa See

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

Sisters, as you know, also have a unique relationship. This is the person who has known you your entire life, who should love you and stand by you no matter what, and yet it's your sister who knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt you the most.

I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.

May and I are sisters. We'll always fight, but we'll always make up as well. That's what sisters do: we argue, we point out each other's frailties, mistakes, and bad judgment, we flash the insecurities we've had since childhood, and then we come back together. Until the next time.

For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.

In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.

Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men's decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.

Catherine Coulter

You know, a cell phone's like a guy; if you don't plug him in every night, charge him good, you got nothing at all.

Get over it,' Sherlock said, and looked at her husband. 'No, no, bad dog, keep quiet.

She realized with a sort of depressed relief that she had no close friend to call, to tell them not to worry about her.

Suz, carrying Savich's plate, the scrambled eggs steaming, stopped to stare after Rachael. 'Isn't this par for the course--a sexy guy with two girls--I'll just bet the little readhead here threatened to whomp the blonde with that cute braid, right?' Sean's our boy, big into computer games and football, wants to help the Redskins build a dynasty, though he doesn't really know what that means

Sean's our boy, big into computer games and football, wants to help the Redskins build a dynasty, though he doesn't really know what that means.

You're going to live. That's not to say you're going to be happy for a while, but it beats the alternative.

Life is so fragile. You're here, then you're not, and it's final, no going back, no changing anything at all.

Scott Westerfeld

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was

Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.

I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.

When she awoke, the world was on fire.

Sometimes the facts in my head get bored and decide to take a walk in my mouth. Frequently this is a bad thing.

We're not freaks, Tally. We're normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we're not hyped-up Barbie dolls.

I don't want to hurt you but I will if I have too.

Charles C. Mann

It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.

The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.

Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed.

Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

On Columbus’s later voyages, his crew happily accepted godhood—until the Taino began empirically testing their divinity by forcing their heads underwater for long periods to see if the Spanish were, as gods should be, immortal.

Candice Millard

The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package," Roosevelt sneered.

She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.

Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come,” he told an audience in Cambridge, England, in the spring of 1910. “If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

Dr. Lister, who treated the wounded Pres. Garfield, had been so stung by the medical establishment's reaction to his embrace of African-American doctors that he, in response, refused to do part from the status quo enough to considering using antiseptic techniques.