"At this basketball game once, we were all chanting "We're number one!  We're number one!"
And Morrie was in the audience a couple rows down and he stood up and asked "What's
wrong with being number 2?"
                                                            -from the movie "Tuesdays with Morrie"

"Focus, Benjamin.  This is important.  If you can find your focus even when you
are in pain, you will find your own power.  That is true beauty."
                                           ~Under a Different Sky by Deborah Savage
 

"A principle that can't bear being laughed at, frowned on, and cold shouldered isn't
worthy of the name"
                          -An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

"I climb fences when I got fences to climb."
                ~ Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

"For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the
cotton is not the land.  Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium.
He is all these, but he is so much more.
                                           ~ Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

...For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond
his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
This you may say of man--when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies,
when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate,
man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes.  Having stepped over
forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back...this you may
know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when
prisoners were not being taken, if the stumbling forward ache were not alive, the
bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut.  Fear the time when the bombs
stop falling while the bombers live--for every bomb is proof that the spirit is not dead.
And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live--for every little
beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken.  And this you can know--fear the
time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the
foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.
                                                                ~ Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
 

"We don't know. . .We don't know anything.  We're voices in the wind.  We all say our piece, play our part and move on.  And we never know the difference we've made."

                                                                    -From A Time of Darkness by Sherryl Jordan

"We all get dealt a hand.  Whether we like it or not, those are the cards we have to play with. . ."
                                                             -From How I Changed My Life by Todd Strasser

"Because I wanted to show you that life goes on. . . You don't give up just because they turn off the spotlight."

                                                                                      -From How I Changed My Life by Todd Strasser

"When you know how to DIE, you know how to LIVE."
                                                                                    -movie Tuesdays With Morrie

The least of us have some influence in this big world
           ~ An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

How can we live without our lives?  How will we know it's us without our past.  No.  Leave it.  Burn it.
                                          ~GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

They sat and looked at it and burned it into their memories.  How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door?  How if you wake up in the night and know--and know the willow tree's not there?  Can you live without the willow tree?  Well, no you can't.  The willow tree is you.  The pain on that mattress there--that dreadful pain--that's you.
                                                    ~GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
 

"Human kind cannot bear very much reality."
                                                        -T. S. Elliot

"Most people can't understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do."
                                                                                                                -Turgenev

"Sure," said Ma.  "Take a man, he can get worried an' worried, an' it eats out his liver, an' purty soon he'll jus' lay down and die with his heart  [eaten] out.  But if you can take an' make 'im mad, why, he'll be awright."
                                                                        ~ Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

When the world and I were young just yesterday
Life was such a simple game a child could play
It was easy then to tell right from wrong
Easy then to tell weak from strong
When a man should stand & fight--or just go along
But today there is no day or night
Today there is no dark  or light
Today there is no black or white
Only shades of gray
                                 -the song "Shades of Gray"  by I'm not sure
 
 

"We don't get what we want when we want it. . .with our people [this is during slavery in the U.S..], we have to go the long way around sometimes.  [he] is doing it...And he'll be so proud because he had to go the long way around, but got there just the same.
                                                ~Wolf by the Ears by Louisa May Alcott
 

"...People are just basically people, aren't they?  You have to accept them the way they are."
                                                        -                                            from the book Emily by Candice F. Ransom

We make our own future.  And we make it not through our dramatic deeds, our great decisions; we make it, we choose it, through the simplest, most insignificant acts of our lives.  Our future hangs on a thread, a single word, an impulse, a moment of anger, a careless gesture, or a smile.  Never forget."
                                                                                 -From the book A Time of Darkness by Sherryl Jordan
 

I thought how I had once wanted to describe my entire life to another person and have them explain my secrets to me.  It occurred to me now that you had to keep a few secrets to yourself, and they weighed a good deal.  Sometimes, they could drive you crazy.
                                                                                -from A Place Apart by Paula Fox

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not the fish they are after."
                                                                                            -Henry David Thoreau
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
                                                                                    -Shakespeare
I guess sometimes you have to choose between smart, sane, ruthlessness and
totally stupid, insane hope.  You can't just pick one and stick with it either.  Each
time it comes up, you have to try & make your best decision.  Most of the time I guess
I have to go with being smart & sane.  But I wouldn't want to live in a world where
people don't try the stupid, crazy, hopeful thing sometimes.
                                                    -Animorphs:  The Departure by K. A. Applegate

Life was sacred, even the life of an enemy.
     -Animorphs:  The Departure by K. A. Applegate

You couldn't choose your family.  But you could learn to accept them.  Or else spend the rest of your
life at odds with them, she realized.
                                                                    -Emily by Candice F. Ransom

Light streamed onto the sidewalk from houses, and I could see people walking around their rooms, or sitting down in front of the gray squares on their television sets.  Looking at them from the outside, I thought of how you could hardly guess what went on inside other peoples' lives.
                                                                                                 -from A Place Apart by Paula Fox