"The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world."
--Roger Williams

"Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was along in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said 'Don't worry ... he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world."
--Alice Sebold

"How strangely sad I feel on seeing a poor man shuffling through the street in a rather worn-out, light yellowish-green coat. I was sorry for him, but the thing that moved me most was that the colour of this coat so vivdly reminded me of my first childish productions in the noble art of painting. This colour was precisely, one of my vital hues. Is it not sad that these colour mixtures, which I still think of with so much pleasure, are found nowhere in life; the whole world thinks them hard, bizarre, suitable only for Nuremberg pictures. Or if one sometimes happens on them, there is always something unpleasent about the encounter, as in the present case. It is always some weak-minded person, or one who has been unfortunate, in short, always someone who feels himself an alien int he world, and whom the world will not recognize. And I, who always painted my heroes with the never-to-be-forgotten yellow-green colouring on their coats! And is it not so with all the mingled colours of childhood? The hues of life once had gradually become too strong, too hard, for our dim eyes."
--Soren Kierkegaard

"Sometimes we feel lonely, to the point of tears and we don't let these tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or we feel a surge of love for someone, but we don't say anything because we're frozen with fear of what those words might do to the relationship."
-- Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie