Here's one problem with drifting: you can't drift your way to the top of the mountain.
We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present.
Those who are animated by hope can perform what would seem impossibilities to those who are under the depressing influence of fear.
The human heart, at whatever age, opens to the heart that opens in return.
If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much.
Hope can produce the finest and most permanent springs of action.
What a misfortune it isto be bornawoman!? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show usthenew limits, the Gothic structure, theimpenetrable barriers of our prison.
I do feel like a fraud a lot of the time because I've never been interested in people who say 'I'm a writer', 'I'm an artist'. Too much is made of the role and not enough of the work. We are such a celebrity-driven age and a status-driven age, that the status becomes more important than the actual work.
The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.
I wish I were less awkward around strangers. I never know what to say when someone asks me who I am and what the hell I'm doing in their house.
People will have an altered idea of who you are unless they really take time to get to know you, which of course they don't. They just get what they see, and they take that to the bank.