A person's true character is revealed by what he does when no one is watching.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

Accept what is done and follow your heart.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

Today I will make decisions based on my sense of impending doom.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

Today I will yawn and fidget when people try to engage me in conversation.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

Procrastination is a safe and effective way to deal with decisions.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

It'll be nice working with proper villains again.
~~~Anonymous/unknown

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
~~~Aesop

I didn't want there to be wars and death, I wanted them not to exist; only rabbits with their colored egg houses, sun and moon orderly above flat earth, summer always, I wanted everyone to be happy.
~~~Margaret Atwood

The company is layered like an ice cream sandwich, with three floors: the upper crust, the lower crust, and our department, the gooey layer in the middle.
~~~Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman

"Not liking other people's babies," said Ainsley, "isn't the same as not liking your own."
~~~Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman

"So I'm finally going mad," she thought, "like everybody else. What a nuisance. Though I suppose it will be a change."
~~~Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman

"Normal isn't the same as average," Ainsley said cryptically. "Nobody is normal."
~~~Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman

These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
~~~Natalie Babbitt Tuck Everlasting

"It'd be nice to have a new name, to start with, one that's not all worn out from being called so much."
~~~Natalie Babbitt Tuck Everlasting

"The way I see it," Miles went on, "it's no good hiding yourself away, like Pa and lots of other people. And it's no good just thinking of your own pleasure, either. People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world."
~~~Natalie Babbitt Tuck Everlasting

Langdon decided not to say another word all evening. Sophie Neveu was clearly a hell of a lot smarter than he was.
~~~Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code

Whenever I'm reminded of my destiny it ruins my day.
~~~Hugh Brown Shu

This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of bodily functions, and - hardly surprising, really - chronic depression.
~~~Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

All the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapon and a grizzly comes for you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.
~~~Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

Perhaps you want to lie down and be as the lichen: not dead exactly but just very still for a long, long time.
~~~Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on the earth....
~~~Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.
~~~Bill Bryson A Walk in the Woods

The truth is that there are no atheists, since who would be so witless as to assert what he cannot prove? Simply and in all candour we must shrug and say we know nothing.
~~~Anthony Burgess

In Pittsburgh, perhaps more than anywhere else in our languid nation, a barmaid does not care.
~~~Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Here I am...at the start of the first summer of my new life, and they tell me I've come in late and missed everything.
~~~Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full well that it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which should have been sufficient to send her straight into business or public relations.
~~~Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

"'Love is like falconry,'" he said. "Don't you think that's true, Cleveland?"
"Never say love is like anything," said Cleveland. "It isn't."
~~~Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

"I hate that thing about 'secret places that no boy can fill.' I don't believe in that. There are no such places."
"Now, Phlox," said Arthur. "Surely you must have one or two secret places."
"She does," I said. "I know she does."
"I do not. What good would boys be if they couldn't fill all the places?"
~~~Michael Chabon The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Lincoln is my favorite president. I feel bad for him because he looks so depressed all the time and his face is on the penny, the cheapest coin of all.
~~~Robert Cormier

Over and over, I prayed the same thing. I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was always a tree nearby.
~~~Sharon Creech

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Russian writers Mikhail Bulgakov Venedikt Erofeev Vladimir Nabokov Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi Mikhail Zoschenko Russian proverbs Miscellany A-C Anonymous/Unknown Aesop Margaret Atwood Natalie Babbitt Dan Brown Hugh Brown Shu Bill Bryson Anthony Burgess Michael Chabon Robert Cormier Sharon Creech

Miscellany D-E Avram Davidson Charles Dickens Steven Dietz George Eastman Umberto Eco Albert Einstein Ralph Waldo Emerson Michael Ende Juliana Ewing Miscellany F-K John Fowles Neil Gaiman Parke Godwin James Goldman William Goldman Simon R. Green The Brothers Grimm Ursula Hegi Aldous Huxley Helen Keller

Miscellany L-T Robert Lasner John Le Carre Nathaniel Lee Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont C. S. Lewis Mary Little David Mamet Merrill Markoe A. A. Milne Jean Baptiste Moliere Garth Nix Edgar Allan Poe Anne Rice Francois de la Rochefoucald Arthur Schopenhauer Lemony Snicket Henry David Thoreau Mark Twain

Miscellany U-Z Voltaire Edith Wharton Oscar Wilde Tennessee Williams Budge Wilson Tom Wolfe Personal Quotebook

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