We will probably be judged not by the monuments that we build but by the monuments we destroy.

- Ada Louise Huxtable

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

- Brendan Gill

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. 

- Gandalf, from Lord of the Rings

What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost.

- Robert Penn Warren (from All The Kings Men )

One person can make a difference. But most of the time they probably shouldn't.

- The Simpsons

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from and to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

- Emma Lazarus

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

- Norman Maclean (from A River Runs Through It )

Think where mans glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

- William Butler Yeats

O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

- George Orwell (from 1984 )