. . I tell you Dain is a splendid catch. I advise you to set your hooks and reel him in.”Jessica took a long swallow of her cognac. “This is not a trout, Genevieve. This is a great, hungry shark.”“Then use a harpoon. - Loretta Chase, Lord of Scoundrels

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic. - Lorrie Moore, Like Life

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one. - Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are. - Anaïs Nin

Always remember people who have helped you along the way, and don’t forget to lift someone up. - Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up. - Dean Karnazes

The meek may inherit the earth, but at the moment it belongs to the conceited. Like me. - Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content - Helen Keller

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair. - Edith Wharton

If you've never eaten while crying you don t know what life tastes like. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are. - Joss Whedon

Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord. - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. - Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World

Sir Beldevere: What makes you think she's a witch? Peasant 3: Well, she turned me into a newt! Sir Beldevere: A newt? Peasant 3: [meekly after a long pause] ... I got better. Crowd: [shouts] Burn her anyway! - Graham Chapman, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Book): Mønti Pythøn Ik Den Hølie Gräilen

I have a high pain threshold. In fact, it's more of a large and tastfully decorated foyer than a threshold. But I do get easily bored - Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

Wise men speak because they have something to say - fools because they have to say something.

I may not look like much, but I'm an expert at pretending to be a ninja. - Darynda Jones, First Grave on the Right

Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right.How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads....Why did they kill little Bobby Franks?Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.. . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain - Clarence Darrow, Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom

What do you most value in your friends?Their continued existence. - Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir