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Favorite "negative" quote:
Richard II's "Cry woe, destruction, ruin and decay.
The worst is death, and death will have his day."
Favorite positive quote may be the entire song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" found worthy by recent singers like Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, Faith Hill, Eva Cassidy, Tori Amos, Pattie Labelle and Jewel.
"What's the difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." ---- Tom Clancy
and then my signature, of course, though it's shortened a little bit
"Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well-tried before you them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." - George Washington.
"A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life."
- Jorge Luis Borges
These aren't ranked in any particular order:
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." -Winston Churchill
"It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life, when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity--two of the best qualities Heaven gives them--and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments." -Charles Dickens
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."
"Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success."
"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution." -Oscar Wilde
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." -Martin Luther King Jr.
"If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights." -Victor Hugo
"We are born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse."
"If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until the looting started. "
"History repeats itself. It has to, no one listens."
"I wish I was as great as my dog thinks I am."
-I don't know who came up with these.
"It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside." -Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (or Sherlock Holmes, rather)
"At age 50, every man has the face he deserves." -George Orwell
"I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, cattle, barns, and farming tools, for these are more easily acquired than gotten rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in." -Henry David Thoreau
"When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." -Mark Twain
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." -Earl Wilson
"The cruelest lies are often told in silence." -Robert Louis Stevenson
"If my career fails there is always alcoholism to fall back on." -Frank Skinner
"My father loved the idea of America. It was living in America that gave him an ulcer." -from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -Bertrand Russell
"It seems to me that man has engaged in a blind and fearful struggle out of a past he can't remember, into a future he can't foresee nor understand. And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself." -John Steinbeck
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" -Mahatma Gandhi
"You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was." -Irish Proverb
I am a quote collector and want to thank you all for contributing to my collection. What a wealth of diversity...
"I know God won't ask more of me than He knows I am capable of. But I wish he didn't trust me so much." Paraphrasing Mother Theresa
On Imagination:
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
~Lewis Carroll
"Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy." - Leo Tolstoy, in War and Peace.
"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."
--Maxim Gorky [pseudonym meaning "Maxim the Bitter" of Aleksey Maximovich Pyeshkov] (1868-1936), Russian author considered the father of Soviet revolutionary literature and founder of the doctrine of socialist realism
"Let the high muse chant loves Olympian:
We are but mortals, and must sing of man."
(Theocrites, Idylls)
"Lighten up while you still can, don't even try to understand. Just find a place to make your stand and take it easy" - Jackson Browne.........I think
"The day when you will say 'I love you less' will be the last day of my love, or the last of my life." - Napoleon Bonaparte.
'' The more things change, the more they stay they same''-Alphonse Karr
"Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were."
Cherie Carter-Scott