You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and it has made all the difference in my life.
— Steve Jobs

When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it. As I learned during my liberal arts education, any symbol can have, in the imaginative context, two versions, a positive and a negative. Blood can either be the gift of life or what comes out of you when you cut your wrists in the bathtub. Or, somewhat less drastically, if you spill your milk you're left with a glass which is either half empty or half full.
— Margaret Atwood

Find something and someone to love - and if you have to choose, I'd go with the someone. It might not lead to your becoming the subject of a PBS documentary, but on the other hand, your chances of ending up on a reality TV show will be immensely improved.
— Andrew Ward

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
— Woody Allen

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
— John Updike

If it's true that this is the best time of your life, if you have already lived or are now living at this age the best years, or if the next few turn out to be the best, then you have my condolences. Because you'll want to remain here, stuck in these so-called best years, never maturing, wanting only to look, to feel and be the adolescent that whole industries are devoted to forcing you to remain.
— Toni Morrison

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
— Nelson Henderson

Stop now. Tell them you won't go. Go back to your rooms. Unpack!
— George Plimpton

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
— E.E. Cummings

It was Conrad Hilton, the hotel millionaire, who was asked towards the end of his long and successful career for some lessons he had learned, something that might be a guide to the young. After a long pause, he said he thought one really good idea was to keep the shower curtain inside the tub.
— Roger Mudd