What a shame that the mind can command the face to assume whatever look or expression it pleases, but cannot command itself and govern its own thoughts.

The closer a person is to calm, the closer they are to strength.

It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.

Some people will say that memory fades away as the years pass. Of course it does if you don't exercise it or aren't very bright to begin with. -- How to grow old: ancient wisdom for the second half of life.

A great fear came over me, and my body went entirely cold, and I stood as if paralyzed with fear; for I knew that the horse was no earthly horse, but the pale horse that will be sent at the Day of Reckoning, and the rider of it is Death; and it was Death himself who stood behind me, with his arms wrapped around me as tight as iron bands, and his lipless mouth kissing my neck as if in love. But as well as the horror, I also felt a strange longing.

Now I wanted to be acknowledged, but I feared it.

Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum [...] But what did it mean? I said. What?, he said. Oh, it meant 'Don't let the bastards grind you down'. I guess we thought we were pretty smart back then.

Becka had a lot of these control-yourself techniques. I tried to practise them. They worked some of the time.

Live performance had suffered in the sabotage panics of the early twenty-first century — no one during those decades had wanted to form part of a large group at a public event in a dark, easily destructible walled space, or no one with any cool or status.