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“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.”
― Henry Louis Gates Jr

“The sky had never seemed so sky; the world had never seemed so world.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“At one point, approximately halfway through her remarks, Merkel stated in German something about ‘being able to greet the president of the United States of America, Barack Obama,�� and an overly ambitious Obama, who perhaps thought that was his cue, headed toward the podium.  Perhaps catching the president’s movement out of the corner of her eye, Merkel thought quickly, and without even looking up from her notes, she told the excited American president, in English, ‘Not yet, dear Mr. President, dear Barack Obama.�� Obama sheepishly returned to his seat to allow the chancellor to finish her speech.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“After that, nothing was the same. The very notion of my having a family turned vague, hard to credit, even weirdly jokey.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows

“Then, in an unusual moment, she grew emotional, which left little doubt about the level of profound respect and admiration Merkel had for her American colleague:
‘So eight years are coming to a close.  This is the last visit of (President) Barack Obama to our country…I am very glad that he chose Germany as one of the stopovers on this trip…Thank you for the reliable friendship and partnership you demonstrated in very difficult hours of our relationship. So let me again pay tribute to what we’ve been able to achieve, to what we discussed, to what we were able to bring about in difficult hours.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“You realize assuming can often lead to getting into trouble.”
― March Lions, The Last Sunset

“In her usual manner, Merkel spoke in German. It is worth pointing out, however, that before the translator had an opportunity to convert her statements to English, Obama gave the chancellor and the press a big smile, saying, ‘I think what she said was good. I’m teasing.�� The laughter in the room drowned out the sounds of the cameras clicking and flashing, with Merkel’s giggle and smile among the loudest.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“Often I felt like two people. One went into the world and did the living for the other, who was stuck in an endless moment of knowing. Yesterday was today and hereon in.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows

“Warmth radiated from her skin in waves. Her pulse beneath his fingertips. The telltale flutter in her neck. Life. It mattered, was precious. And could be taken away in an instant.”
― J. Rose Black, Losing My Breath

“He grimaced and went after her. “I’m not a trainer. Just spent a lot of time working out.”��

“Misspent youth, clearly.�� She held the door open, standing just outside. 

“My application to princess school was rejected.�� Callan exited the building and fell into step alongside her. “Working out was how I coped.��

Sunlight peeked out from behind striped clouds and lit the early-morning sky. Autumn weather chilled the perspiration on his skin. 

“Such a shame.�� Meridian glanced up at him out of the corner of her eye. 

“What is?”��

“That you didn’t go to princess school. Could have learned some manners.�� Her blue-green eyes sparked in the sunlight. And her mouth . . . Her lips set in some smart-looking, lopsided grin, with a small dimple. 

I should definitely kiss that look off her face.

“Overrated. Inefficient. And I look terrible in a tiara.”
― J. Rose Black, Losing My Breath

“There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“He clamped his eyes shut and waited for the pang of something he could no longer name to subside; it plucked at steel threads holding him together and reverberated through his system.”
― J. Rose Black, Losing My Breath

“Words define us, they explain us, and, on occasion, they serve to control or isolate us.”
― Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words

“You can’t save anyone who wouldn’t save themselves without you. It’s the
hardest lesson to learn in life, take it from me.”
― Marc Jampole

“No one hath seen beauty in its highest lustre who hath never seen it in distress.”
― Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

“Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.”
― D. Harlan Wilson, The Kyoto Man

“And when I’d settled down, I considered the possibility that I wasn’t yet ready to ask for the love of anyone because I had yet to learn how to truly love myself.  ”
― Steven Decker, Addicted to Time

“Teacher,�� I said. “Can you feel love?”
― Steven Decker, Child of Another Kind

“They never opened the door which leads to the soul.”
― Henry Miller

“When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.”
― David McCullough, John Adams

“Peter loved to hear the story of how his father tried to steal the sun. ”
― Douglas Weissman, Life Between Seconds

“  “What’s puzzling is the sender wrote, ‘I hope this is helpful for the Tariq’Allah office in Istanbul. Stay in touch.�� Turkey does not speak Arabic. Someone wrote this cover page in Arabic.”
― Karl Braungart, Fatal Identity

“She imagined all the mothers of the unnamed children, imagined the ad cut from the paper, a mother writing her child’s name at the bottom of the list to add their child to the names of those who would return home, those beautiful children who would never be forgotten, as if their child’s name needed to be on the list to be remembered—to have been disappeared. ”
― Douglas Weissman

“James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation."

(Little Review, 1918)”
― T.S. Eliot

“Who’s to say what a ‘literary life�� is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!”
― Roman Payne, Cities & Countries

“Phaedra keeps saying she's being selfish. That she hates herself for it, but she does it anyway. She can't deny herself what she wants, even if it brings about her downfall and his." "And have you learned anything from our literary parallel?" "Not really, I keep thinking that she would do it all over again if there were a chance...a chance that it could go right. Even if 99 times out of a 100 the story ends badly, it's worth it if only once she gets a happy ending.”
― Cora Carmack, Losing It

“One by one, slow, quiet, with little more than a whispered end, Sofia snuffed the remaining candles. For every prayer she had that was never answered, she extinguished another light, another’s prayer, determined to take it back, to take them all back. ”
― Douglas Weissman, Life Between Seconds

“Love enters later in life through the cracks left by the first heartbreak.”
― D. Biswas, A to Z Stories of Life and Death