Harlan Ellison

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned. 
Adult. You have become adult.

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid.

The world is turning into a cesspool of imbeciles.

In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.

Nalo Hopkinson

Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.

The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.

How do I know anything? How is it that my arms stretched out in front of me are so pale? How to I even know that they should be brown like riverbank mud, as they were when I was many goddesses with many worshippers, ruling in lands on the other side of a great, salty ocean? I used to be many, but now we are one, all squeezed together, many necks in one coffle.

Suck all the juice this life will give!

You folk are so finicky about time, living it in straight lines like that.

When your elders are millennia-old demigods, you’d best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.

In the back of my mind’s eye, everything had a fuzzy green haze on it, like a brand-new tennis ball. The world was getting its Shine on.

Jean Kerr

I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself-like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get home, but it doesn't always go with everything in the house.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation. 

The only reason that they say, 'Women and children first' is to test the strength of the lifeboats.

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speech by something outside himself - like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.

Wendelin Van Draane

Some of us get dipped in flat, some in satin, some in gloss...." He turned to me. "But every once in a while, you find someone who's iridescent, and when you do, nothing will ever compare.

My heart stopped. It just stopped beating. And for the first time in my life, I had that feeling. You know, like the world is moving all around you, all beneath you, all inside you, and you're floating. Floating in midair. And the only thing keeping you from drifting away is the other person's eyes. They're connected to yours by some invisible physical force, and they hold you fast while the rest of the world swirls and twirls and falls completely away

One's character is set at an early age. The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life. I hate to see you swim out so far you can't swim back.

To by held above the earth and be brushed by the wind," she said,"it's like your heart has been kissed by beauty.

Somehow the silence seemed to connect us in a way like words never could.

Max Ehrmann

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

You are a child of the universe, 
no less than the trees and the stars; 
you have a right to be here. 
And whether or not it is clear to you, 
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love – for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you from misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Michael Cunningham

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Beauty is a whore, I like money better.

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

Richard Siken

You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.

We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else.

Mary Renault

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

True friends share everything, except the past before they met.

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.

One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.

Maria Montessori

Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.

It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist.

Within the child lies the fate of the future.

Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment.

Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future.

Seamus Heaney

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

It is always better
to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.
For every one of us, living in this world
means waiting for our end. Let whoever can
win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,
that will be his best and only bulwark.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme