“I have often found that nothing can compare to a soft, warm bed on a vicious winter’s day. Howling winds and drenching rains are noting when you’re tucked safely beneath a heavy blanket and a pile of hand-knitted quilts.”

Scott McNeely, Service All Hours

“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing!”

Fyodor Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov

“It’s hard to stay mad when it’s so much beauty in the world.”

American Beauty

“… beauty is largely a matter of craft and adjustment.”

James Stephens, Three Young Wives

“Physical beauty, he had learned quite early, was the arbiter of nothing, could even be a dangerous and bloody thing.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“But isn’t every life, isn’t every work beautiful?”

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The dreadful thing is that beauty is not only terrifying but also mysterious.”

Fyodor Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov

“Beauty is perhaps a dangerous possession.”

Agatha Christie, The Companion

“A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn’t say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn’t like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn’t shave.”

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“He believed in himself; therefore he hid not need to believe in God”

Paul Theroux, My Other Life

“… we have not yet caught up with the present… But give us time. We are most ingenious people. Once show us the way and there is our salvation. We are extremely flexible people. Watch out that we do not catch you and overtake you!”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“The world is different here.”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“One is never truly alone in Asia, is that not so?”

Eric Van Lustbader, The Ninja

“Never send a human to do a machine’s job.”

The Matrix

“You paint with your whole being. First you learn that. The rest is luck.”

John Fowles, The Collector

“Call me a Philistine, if you like, but Art really only became Art in the last two centuries. Essentially, before that, it was furniture for improving one’s home.”

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

“… everybody knows that the arts are selfish.”

Oscar Wilde, The Nightingale and the Rose

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.”

John Fowles, The Collector

“Man’s arrogance is boastful, woman’s is something in the fibre.”

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Veteran regiments in the army were likely to be very small congregations of men.”

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage