Before Year Ends Quotes & Sayings

I lack the imagination. For that reason I have to pack, stuff into my pockets odds and ends, passport, money, and go see what it's really like. Whenever the time of year or the weather changes, I have to pack up whatever I can't do without and visit all those places I've been before, to make sure they still exist — Andrzej Stasiuk

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing. — Susanna Clarke

When even one virtue becomes our nature, the mind becomes clean and tranquil. Then there is no need to practice meditation; we will automatically be meditating always. (151) — Swami Satchidananda

My favorite part about spending time in Key West is riding my bike everywhere. We have these old bikes: mine is orange, Amber's is white, but they both have sweet and cheesy floral baskets. Our bikes are so old you can hear us coming from a mile away - we just squeak, squeak, squeak down the road. We always take the back roads and go past the cemetery. My favorite tombstone says, "See? I told you I was sick." It's so much the spirit of Key West that even the gravestones make you smile. But this time it was also Katie Couric — Robin Roberts

And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. — Thomas Jefferson

I've always loved Def Leppard, ever since I was little. — Taylor Swift

Without awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body. — Alexander Lowen

So that every wand or staff of empire is forsooth curved at top. — Francis Bacon

Read everything you can get your hands on. — Alina Bronsky

Prosperity is the best protector of principle. — Mark Twain

Would you like some wine, or would you prefer to yell at me for a little longer?" asked the Beast pleasantly. "I could leave, if you prefer, but I generally hold that those who leave the room when you wish to yell at them are among the most despicable of beings. — T. Kingfisher

You've turned to wood, he observed, you've not only renounced life, your own interests and society's, your duty as a citizen and a human being, your friends (all the same you did have them), you've not only renounced any goal whatsoever apart from winning, but you've even renounced your memories. I remember you in an ardent and strong moment of your life; but I'm sure you've forgotten all your best impressions then; your dreams, your most essential desires at present don't go beyond pair and impair, rouge, noir, the twelve middle numbers, and so on, and so forth
I'm sure of it! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Alexandre Dumas wrote those lines when he had just turned forty-five and had decided it was time to reflect on his life. He never got past chronicling his thirty-first year - which was well before he had published a word as a novelist - yet he spent more than the first two hundred pages on a story that is as fantastic as any of his novels: the life of his father, General Alexandre - Alex - Dumas, a black man from the colonies who narrowly survived the French Revolution and rose to command fifty thousand men. The chapters about General Dumas are drawn from reminiscences of his mother and his father's friends, and from official documents and letters he obtained from his mother and the French Ministry of War. It is a raw and poignant attempt at biography, full of gaps, omissions, and re-creations of scenes and dialogue. But it is sincere. The story of his father ends with this scene of his death, the point at which the novelist begins his own life story. — Tom Reiss