When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.
-Alexander Graham Bell


The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
-Albert Einstein


Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
-Arthur Golden


It hurt me a little bit to stand there and lie. Sometimes truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.
-James McBride


It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
-Margaret Atwood


To be lost is only a failure of memory.
-Margaret Atwood


Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
-T.S. Eliot


For life is holy and every moment is precious.
-Jack Kerouac


I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind--and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
-Michel de Montaigne


Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.
-Percy Bysshe Shelly