“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?

It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

I’ve learned what it feels like to lose, believe me. But I think, in the end, that is just going to make winning that much better.

There’s so many things that I’ve gone through that I want to share because there’s other teenagers that are going through the same things or will go through the same things.

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.

My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.

I just want everyone to know I’m suing Ruben Studdard. He had his hand on my ass and he wouldn’t let go.

I’m going back to the old Shaq. I was normal last year – I was an earthling last summer. I had to go back to my alien roots.

I have no friends here apart from the dudes at my record label, and I didn’t go to school with no one.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.