Hostage is a crucifying aloneness. It is a silent, screaming slide into the bowels of ultimate despair. Hostage is a man hanging by his fingernails over the edge of chaos, feeling his fingers slowly straightening. Hostage is the humiliating stripping away of every sense and fiber of body and mind and spirit that make us what we are. Hostage is a mutant creation filled with fear, self-loathing, guilt and death-wishing. But he is a man, a rare, unique and beautiful creation of which these things are no part.
—Brian Keenan (Irish-British Writer)
People always call it luck when you’ve acted more sensibly than they have.
—Anne Tyler (American Novelist)
There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blamable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavor the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretense of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.
—David Hume (Scottish Philosopher, Historian)
You don’t retire in this business. You just notice the phone has not rung for 10 years.
—Warren Mitchell (English Actor)
Scandal is merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.
—Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) (British Short Story Writer)
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
—Jane Jacobs (Canadian Urbanologist)
Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.
—James Dickey (American Poet, Novelist)
A countenance habitually under the influence of amiable feelings acquires a beauty of the highest order from the frequency with which such feelings stamp their character upon it.
—Sarah Josepha Hale (American Poet)
A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.
—John F. Kennedy (American Head of State)
Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves—or desires.
—Jacquetta Hawkes (English Archaeologist, Writer)
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
—Alan Watts (British-American Philosopher)