Quotations

"Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."

— D. H. Lawrence, English writer, born 1885

"Life is much too serious to be taken seriously."

— Vicki Lawrence, American comedienne, born 1949

"There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past."

— Emma Lazarus, American poet, born 1849

"Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned."

— Emma Lazarus, American poet, born 1849

"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."

— Ursula K. Le Guin, American author, born 1929

"I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant."

— Ursula K. Le Guin, American author, born 1929

"To light a candle is to cast a shadow."

— Ursula K. Le Guin, American author, born 1929

"Why can't we build orphanages next to homes for the elderly? If someone were sitting in a rocker, it wouldn't be long before a kid will be in his lap."

— Cloris Leachman, American actress, born 1926

"I have found him—found our man!"

— Mary Leakey, English anthropologist, born 1913

"I had never passed a single school exam, and clearly never would."

— Mary Leakey, English anthropologist, born 1913

"No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely."

— Mary Leakey, English anthropologist, born 1913

"I'd rather be in a tent than in a house."

— Mary Leakey, English anthropologist, born 1913

"Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph, one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate... Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A moment of touching a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything."

— Norman Lear, American screenwriter, born 1922

"You cannot use butterfly language to communicate with caterpillars."

— Timothy Leary, American psychologist, born 1920