"Take your life in your hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame."
- Erica Jong

"If we offend, it is with our good will,
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end.
Consider then we come but in despite.
We do not come as minding to content you,
Our true intent is. All for your delight,
We are not here."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"Professionally and personally, it's inappropriate to live your life trying to define it in terms of success or failure. If I had kids, I wouldn't want to raise them to think they had somehow failed. A different kind of vocabulary needs to apply to such things. Not to excuse mistakes, but to not bash yourself up for the rest of your life."
- Kenneth Branagh

"I want to make one thing perfectly clear - I never explain anything."
- Mary Poppins

"As long as people will accept crap,
it will be financially profitable to dispense it."
- Dick Cavett

"Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world -- even if what is published is not true."
- Richard Bach, Illusions

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear."
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

"To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee;
for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while, till we can clear these ambiguities."
- William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

"When angry, count four; when very angry, swear."
- Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson

"Apathy is a sort of living oblivion."
- Horace Greeley

"Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless.
Love and hate don't stand a chance against it."
- Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen

"Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews."
- John Updike

"A lot of people today are just watching life secondhand on television. They're not living life."
- Liam Clancy, Irish folksinger

"He just phoned to wash his head at us."
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"Lack of pep is often mistaken for patience."
- Kin Hubbard

"Weariness of the legs after some active deed is better than apathy and weariness of the spirit; weariness of spirit lasts forever, weariness of the legs lasts only for an hour."
- 15th century Scots-Gaelic epigram

"Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps."
- Emo Phillips

"Never put off until tomorrow that which can be done the day after tomorrow." - Mark Twain "Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us.
'Nothing' is the worst thing that can happen to us!"
- Richard Bach, One

"So it goes."
- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

"Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
- Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead."
- Aldous Huxley

"Nature abhors dimensional abnormalities, and seals them away so that they don't upset people. Nature, in fact, abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys for electric drills."
- Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

"I pretty much try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face."
- Johnny Depp

"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool."
- Jane Wagner

"Did I do anything wrong today, or has the world always been like this and I've been to wrapped up in myself to notice?"
- Arthur Dent (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"I fondly hope I'm beginning to misconstrue you."
- Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"If you find a town which looks deserted, it's probably for a reason. Take the hint and stay away."
- unknown

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
- George Bernard Shaw

"For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone,
which no good man gives up except with his life."
- Scottish Declaration of Independence, 1320

"Freedom!!"
- Mel Gibson as Scottish revolutionary William Wallace in Braveheart

"A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety."
- Aesop, The Town Mouse & the Country Mouse

"...This sense of order is what makes freedom possible. There are 11 political parties in Denmark because there is only one way to eat lunch. You don't eat at your desk or as you drive and you don't walk down the street munching a hot dog. You eat at a table with a napkin and a knife and fork and candle."
- Garrison Keillor

"Everything that existed, existed in a captured state. Animate or inanimate, everything wanted to be free.
That's what the lights said; that was their secret. Wild lights in the night skies, and domesticated lights, right here on the street, they all told the same tale. It was so plain to see when you knew how to look. Didn't neon and streetlights yearn to be starlight?"
- Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

"I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom
and democracy - but that could change."
- Dan Quayle

"You speak treason!"
"Fluently."
- Marian (Olivia de Havilland) & Robin (Errol Flynn), The Adventures of Robin Hood

"All kings is mostly rapscallions."
- Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"How happy are the wild birds, they can go where they will, now to the sea, now to the mountain, and come home without rebuke."
- 17th century Welsh epigram

"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once."
- Robert Heinlein

"O horror! horror! horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!"
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"There were monstrous shapes in the mist. The stench of old graves dug open and corpse breath haunted the air. Childhood night terrors came to life: a Pandora's box of horrors and fears; specters of death and pestilence...."
- Charles de Lint, The Little Country

"I discovered I scream the same way whether I'm about to be devoured by a Great White or if a piece of seaweed touches my foot."
- Kevin James

"Foul whisperings are abroad. Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"Vampires are real ... but thank God not all of them are evil."
- Doug Moench, Batman: Bloodstorm

"Evil flowed from those eyes like blood from a fresh wound."
- Charles de Lint, Yarrow

"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"The mome rath isn't born that could outgrabe me."
- Nicol Williamson

"There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else."
- Lily Tomlin

Tom Knapp, reporter: "What is the most frightening thing you have ever really seen?"
Chet Williamson, horror writer: "That's hard. As far as real horror goes, I suppose I've been lucky. I mean, how much horror can you see in Lancaster County besides overdevelopment?"

"What are these, so withered, and so wild in their attire, that look
not like th' inhabitants o' the earth, and yet are on 't?"
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"What the world needs is more geniuses with humility; there are so few of us left."
- Oscar Levant

"It was irritating to have one's physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger."
- Tom Holt, Expecting Someone Taller

"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
- William Somerset Maugham

"Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself."
- Jane Wagner

"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"I apologize for boasting, but when you come to know my virtues
I can drop back into quite brilliant humility."
- Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"When I feel my head start to swell, I look at Ringo and know perfectly well we're not supermen."
- John Lennon

"When you're great, people often mistake candor for bragging."
- Calvin (Bill Watterson)

"When you're as great as I am, it's hard to be humble."
- Muhammad Ali

"If your body is really weird, try showing it to people in the streets for money."
- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.
- Charley Reese

The jealous are troublesome to others, but a torment to themselves.
- William Penn

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own.
- Harold Coffin

Jealousy is an awkward homage which inferiority renders to merit.
- Mme. de Puixieux

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.
- Honore de Balzac

O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
- William Shakespeare, Othello

Envy is a littleness of soul, which cannot see beyond a certain point, and if it does not occupy the whole space feels itself excluded.
- William Hazlitt

Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.
- Henry Fielding

"Good fortune often abides with a fool."
- Irish saying

"Good luck will rub off when I shakes hands with you."
- Bert, Mary Poppins

"Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit."
- R.E. Shay

"Good luck is better than early rising."
- Irish saying

"Every man has bad luck awaiting him some time or other.
But leave the bad luck to the last; perchance it may never come."
- Irish saying

"I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it."
- unknown

"Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you.
Never touch the stuff myself, you understand.
Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations."
- Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke

"I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

"There's an otherworldly look in their eyes -- a kind of mad light that makes them appear not quite all there anymore. They smile when there's nothing humorous. They seem to watch things move that aren't there. Such people are disconcerting to those who haven't traveled here; they make people uneasy, because madness -- no matter how slightly it has brushed against someone - always seems dangerous to those who haven't known its touch."
- Charles de Lint, The Dreaming Place

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
- C.G. Jung

"A man talking sense to himself
is no madder than a man talking nonsense
not to himself."
- Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

"If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror
and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves."
- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

"There were plus points in being a madman. People hesitated to stop you, in case it made things worse."
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
- Mark Twain

"One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria."
- Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning

"I'd rather the world went crazy than to think it was just me."
- Charles de Lint, Yarrow

"Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying,
but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?"
- Lily Tomlin

"A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free."
- Nikos Kazantzakis

"O thou invisible spirit of wine! if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!"
- William Shakespeare, Othello

"He was a wise man who invented beer."
- Plato

"Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza."
- Dave Barry

"Reality is an illusion that occurs due to lack of alcohol."
- unknown

"I now realize that taking drugs was like taking an aspirin without having a headache."
- Paul McCartney

"I have very poor and unhappy brains for drinking;
I could well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment."
- William Shakespeare, Othello

"Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs."
- Lily Tomlin

"A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums."
- Hunter S. Thompson as quoted by William F. Buckley, who added:
"Though one should be prepared to vomit rather frequently and disport with pink elephants and assorted grotesqueries while trying, often unsuccessfully, to make one's way to the toilet."

"People who drink light 'beer' don't like the taste of beer; they just like to pee a lot."
- Capital Brewery, Middleton, WI

"O God! that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains; that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts."
- William Shakespeare, Othello

"Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer."
- Dave Barry

"It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass a water."
- Ford Prefect & Arthur Dent (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold,
What hath quench'd them hath given me fire."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer."
- Dave Barry

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
- Hunter S. Thompson

"What I need is a strong drink and a peer group."
- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
- Ernest Hemingway

"The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind."
- Humphrey Bogart

"When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."
- Henny Youngman

"If God had intended us to drink beer, He would have given us stomachs."
- David Daye

"Come, come; good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used; exclaim no more against it."
- William Shakespeare, Othello

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
- Benjamin Franklin

"Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, 'It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.'"
- by Jack Handy

"Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine."
- David Moulton

"Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."
- Winston Churchill

"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
- Homer Simpson

"Strife is better than loneliness."
- Irish saying

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
- M. Kathleen Casey

"Sometimes I feel as though there's this hidden country inside me, a landscape that's going to remain forever unexplored because I can't make a normal connection with another human being, with someone who might map it out for me. It's my land, it belongs to me, but I'm denied access to it. The only way I could ever see it is through the eyes of someone outside this body of mine, through the eyes of someone who loves me.
I think we all have these secret landscapes inside us, but I don't think that anybody else ever thinks about them. All I know is that no one visits mine. And when I'm with other people, I don't know how to visit theirs."
- Charles de Lint, The Ivory & the Horn

"You're an emotional vampire, with blood in the corner of your mouth,
and you put on matching lipstick so no one knows."
- Tori Amos

"It is sad to have no friend; sad to have unfortunate children;
sad to have only a poor hut; but sadder to have nothing good or bad."
- Irish saying

"To hate a part of yourself is to hate yourself, and I know no blacker feeling."
- Emma Bull, Finder

"I like so much being left alone that I tend to leave other people alone, too."
- T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

"All miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone."
- Pascal

"Conversation is the cure for every sorrow. Even contention is better than loneliness."
- Irish saying

"Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
- John Lennon

"Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors."
- Charles de Lint, Moonheart

"Peace
Is the temporary beautiful ignorance that War
Somewhere progresses."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

"The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith."
- John Foster Dulles

"There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."
- A.J. Muste

"If you find warmth makes you dry, you'd better come in."
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet

"When I finish with my cereal, I put the bowl away with the spoon in it. Why go to a separate drawer to get a spoon every morning? I'm going to need it, leave it there. How often an I going to use that bowl and not need the spoon that goes with it? I'll worry about that situation when I am faced with it."
- Jerry Seinfeld

"Those who wear fig leaves should not dance with hungry goats."
- Lewis Cougill

"How can you tell there's anything out there? The door's closed."
- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
- Steven Wright

"If you want to know flowers, you have to know weeds."
- unknown

"What's done cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"If you weren't born, you don't count."
- Harold Hodgkinson, educational demographer

"Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly."
- warning in a Batman costume

"Never test the depth of the water with both feet."
- unknown

"They're funny things, Accidents. You never have them until you're having them."
- Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

"Clothes that are supposed to be the same size often fit differently."
- Andy Rooney

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
- Albert Einstein

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
- William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"As a general rule, don't solve puzzles that open portals to Hell."
- unknown

"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff."
- Mariah Carey

"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"
- Lee Iacocca

"Like a parasite that fails to realize its welfare would be enhanced by cooperating with rather than killing its host, humanity is overwhelming earth's life support systems."
- Carl May

"When gods get together they tell the story of one particular planet whose inhabitants watched, with mild interest, huge continent-wrecking slabs of ice slap into another world which was, in astronomical terms, right next door -- and then did nothing about it because that sort of thing only happens in Outer Space."
- Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

"In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that one must have long legs."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"I've always thought that the underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted."
- Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, explaining why the United States should export toxic waste to Third World Countries

"The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that 999,999,999,999 times out of 1,000,000,000,000 it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it."
- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

"If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How
intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?"
- Linda Ellerbee

"Many feel they are called to the priesthood, but what they really hear is an inner voice saying, 'It's indoor work with no heavy lifting, do you want to be a ploughman like your father?'"
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

"I base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch."
- Gilda Radner

"Push something hard enough and it will fall over."
- Fudd's First Law of Opposition

"Reality is nothing but a collective hunch."
- Lily Tomlin

"A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going a long with it ever since."
- Charles de Lint, "Where Desert Spirits Crowd the Night"

"There's no use trying. One can't believe impossible things."
"I dare say you haven't had much practice. ... Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
- Alice & the Queen of Hearts (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

"Reality is an experiment that failed. It's time to move on."
- anonymous

"We have normality. I repeat, we have normality.
Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."
- John Lennon

"The idea of having a cup of coffee is usually better than the coffee."
- Andy Rooney

"You're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of if whatsoever."
- Baron Munchausen

"If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities."
- Maya Angelou

"He had questioned. He had scoffed. But he knew now that those who questioned, those who took it all apart trying to find out what it was and what made it tick ... they lost out in the end. The magic would always elude them. The mystery would only deepen. Because if it lost its secrecy, it just wouldn't be the mystery anymore. It would rob the experience of its potency. All you'd have left would be dry dust and the voices of men discussing what it was all about. The quiet, the music, the magic would be gone."
- Charles de Lint, Greenmantle

"All my friends tell me I actually exist, and by an act of faith I've come to believe them."
- Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning

"If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe."
- Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), Star Trek: The Next Generation

"Once upon a time we had the good sense to realize that periodic despair is normal, that squabbles between husbands and wives or parents and children are unavoidable, that not everybody is intended to live in bliss unending. We even had enough horse sense to realize that anyone who is happy all the time must be mad. One indication of good health is precisely the capacity to be unhappy when reality warrants it -- to be unhappy without anxiety, apology or defensiveness."
- Leo Rosten

"You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's all full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion." - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

"That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here,
all around us, or it just stays invisible for you."
- Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

"Coincedence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and the pulleys."
- Emma Bull, Bone Dance

"The world will not perish for want of wonders, but for want of wonder. Reality is stranger than we could ever imagine."
- J.B.S. Haldane, geneticist and mathematician

"Reality, however utopian, is something from which people
feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays."
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World