All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Don't judge a book by its cover

A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.

if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away

Everybody should have a librarian.

That I would be loved even when I numb myself. That I would be good even when I am overwhelmed. That I would be loved even when I was fuming. That I would be good even if I was clingy.

Everyone's connected but no one is connecting.

I mean the prime case that you can look at is Martin Luther King, who was only an activist for 13 years. But every year, he became deeper, more concerned, connecting more issues.

Who am I that I have to sing under an umbrella? These people are my fans, and if they can stand in the rain to hear me sing, I can stand in the rain.

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year.

Death's not a separation or alteration or parting; it's just a one-handled door.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.