The earth is beautiful and bright and kindly, but that is not all. The earth is also terrible and dark and cruel.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1970
Archive
Quotes
Oh, democracy! Whither are you leading us?
—Aristophanes, 414 BCA tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W.H. Auden, 1946Friendship is not possible between two women, one of whom is very well dressed.
—Laurie Colwin, 1978Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
—Cormac McCarthy, 1992Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.
—Tom Stoppard, 1993Even a paranoid can have enemies.
—Henry Kissinger, 1977Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.
—W.B. Yeats, 1937In the country gossip is a pastime; in the city it is a warfare.
—W.M.L. Jay, 1870Wherever commerce prevails there will be an inequality of wealth, and wherever the latter does a simplicity of manners must decline.
—James Madison, 1783Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
—William Empson, 1928I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
—Galileo Galilei, 1615The appointed thing comes at the appointed time in the appointed way.
—Myrtle Reed, 1910