Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jeanne Calment

When I'm laid in my coffin, I want you to put a picture of my grandchild to the right of me and and a picture of my daughter to my left. That way they will be buried with me.

Homer

All things are in the hand of heaven, and Folly, eldest of Jove's daughters, shuts men's eyes to their destruction. She walks delicately, not on the solid earth, but hovers over the heads of men to make them stumble or to ensnare them.

J. K. Rowling

The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous....You know I didn't think they'd rake through my bins, I didn't expect to be photographed on the beach through long lens. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter's life negatively, which at times it has. It would be churlish to say there's nothing good about being famous; to have a total stranger walk up to you as you're walking around Safeways, and say a number of nice things that they might say about your work.

J. K. Rowling

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Guillermo del Toro

With every movie I produce, I learn something. I watch the directors. It's like the relationship you have with your children. I'm there to learn from my daughters. They are the perfect spirits.

Grace Kelly

My parents, despite their serious attitude toward life in general, and that of their children in particular, were very broadminded people. There was no such thing as a bad profession for them. As I was their daughter, they knew that, whatever profession I chose, I would do it well. That was enough for them. There was always trust among the Kellys.

Grace Kelly

Having a [teenage] daughter is like riding a young horse over an unknown steeplechase course. You don't know when to pull up the reins, when to let the horse have its head - or what.

Grace Jones

My husband used to shout at my mother, 'What is wrong with your daughter? I'm married to a man.'

Ja Rule

I think it's time that we all be there for the children, to learn from the ones who came before us, and to teach our sons and daughters to have respect for themselves. Break the cycle.

Richard Leakey

Echoing the criticism made of his father's habilis skulls, he added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination made of plaster of Paris', thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.

T. D. Jakes

I grew up in hospitals. My father was sick. So I grew up in hospitals from the age of 10. Got to see a lot of suffering.

Harper Lee

I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

Iyanla Vanzant

For most of my life, I believed that my father had broken many of my bones. They were emotional and psychological bones; things no one could see, things that caused me to limp through life clutching for and holding on to people and situations that often rendered me immobile.

Rebecca West

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

Russell Baker

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.

Umberto Eco

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

Salman Rushdie

Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.

Sam Brownback

You can look at founding father Alexander Hamilton nevertheless assuring - assuring - the countrymen in Federalist 78 that the role of the federal courts under the proposed Constitution would be limited.

Azar Nafisi

A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.

Bertrand Russell

Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

Charles Kettering

Thinking is one thing no one has ever been able to tax.

Demi Lovato

When I look back, it saddens me to think that I was so hard on myself - when I was younger, I thought I had to look like everyone else, but I learned that beauty comes from how you feel about yourself. Once I started taking care of my mind, body, and soul, I realized that I didn't need to conform to what's "normal" and started to love myself.

Demetri Martin

I think it's interesting that cologne rhymes with alone.

Bernie Sanders

What the Des Moines Register said - you know, there were coin - I think there were half a dozen coin flips - a fairly chaotic type situation. At the end of the day, no matter how it's recounted, it will break roughly even. I love and respect the caucus process in Iowa. See, and I don't have to say it, because they voted already.

Donald Fagen

It's great to know that our old stuff still sounds good to our fans, just as it's wonderful to think that we've turned a few people on to jazz over the years.

Donald Fagen

We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK.

Donald Knuth

I remember that mathematicians were telling me in the 1960s that they would recognize computer science as a mature discipline when it had 1,000 deep algorithms. I think we've probably reached 500.