Short Running Inspirational Quotes & Sayings

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man. — Ayn Rand

For a writer, mail is not just a collection of bills and letters and offers to subscribe to Sports Illustrated. It's an umbilical cord, a connection to the outside world, the giver of pleasure and pain. It shapes the day, is the moment, inexorable as the tide, toward which all the hours rise and fall. — Mameve Medwed

Customers came - whites, Negroes and Latin Americans. Well-dressed tourists mingled with the derelicts of the quarter. When we shined their shoes we talked. The whites, especially the tourists, had no reticence before us, and no shame since we were Negroes. Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with the warmth and courtesy of equals. I mentioned this to Sterling. "Yeah, when they want to sin, they're very democratic," he said. — John Howard Griffin

Why aren't the Nets playing in Newark? — Shaquille O'Neal

I knew I wouldn't get an invitation. I would be lucky to get an invitation to my own funeral, with my reputation. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The end of the world hasn't granted the clumsiest among us any measure of grace. — Patricia Hamill

Death is my son-in-law. Death is my heir.
My daughter he hath wedded. I will die,
And leave him all. Life, living, all is Death's. — William Shakespeare

The author distinguishes George Washington's leadership from that of another aristocratic general whose temperament was somewhat cold. Unlike him, Washington made the effort to at least appear to suffer with his troops. — John Ferling

I had, of course, witnessed hundreds of people in a casino before, mindlessly dropping coins into slot machines. They don't play for money in America. It's true. The big payout is incidental to most gamblers. It's the numbness they're after. Not so in China. No one had that look of glazed stupor often found in American casinos. — J. Maarten Troost