A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.
—Jane Austen, 1816
Archive
Quotes
There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866The Mediterranean has the colors of a mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet—you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing light has taken on a tinge of pink or gray.
—Vincent van Gogh, 1888It’s only the futility of the first flood that prevents God from sending a second.
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1794Never trust her at any time when the calm sea shows her false alluring smile.
—Lucretius, c. 60 BCIf a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.
—Coretta Scott King, 1994Those who believe in freedom of the will have never loved and never hated.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1893Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake.
—Ovid, 10No time to marry, no time to settle down, I’m a young woman, and ain’t done runnin’ round.
—Bessie Smith, 1926Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded.
—The Dhammapada, c. 400 BCIn tampering with the earth, we tamper with a mystery.
—Jonathan Schell, 2000In a true democracy, everyone can be upper-class and live in Connecticut.
—Lisa Birnbach, 1980