Of troubles none is greater than to be robbed of one’s native land.
—Euripides, 431 BC
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Quotes
This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.
—Horace, c. 35 BCFamilies, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
—André Gide, 1897I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.
—James Thurber, 1955Money is mourned with deeper sorrow than friends or kindred.
—Juvenal, 128Memories are hunting horns
whose noise dies away in the wind.
Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men, but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.
—Joseph Addison, 1711Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.
—Robert Southey, 1809The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992No time to marry, no time to settle down, I’m a young woman, and ain’t done runnin’ round.
—Bessie Smith, 1926Hospitality consists in a little fire, a little food, and an immense quiet.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1856