"The broader question if Sarah Palin becomes vice president, will she be shortchanging her kids or will she be shortchanging the country?"

“About Swami Vivekanada: I am not saying that the message of the Swami was the final word in our nationalism... But it was tremendous - something with an undying glory of its own. If you read his books, if you read his lectures, you are struck at once with his love of humanity, his patriotism, not abstract patriotism which came to us from Europe but of different nature altogether a more living thing, something which we feel within ourselves when we read his writings.”

“When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might end up loving some of them. And who knows what might happen to you then?”

Source : FaceBook post by Jonathan Franzen from Apr 06, 2012

“I had a lot of very religious influences - Christian religious.”

“God allows and at times causes us to go through the kinds of circumstances that strip away all falsehood and leave us with our real selves. God's ultimate intent is not to leave us faithless, but to leave us faith-full. There are few things as exhilarating as going through the fire and finding that you had the resilience to make it through. All of us wonder at times whether we have what it takes. God wants to bring us to a place where we have no doubt of the work He has done within us.”

Source : Erwin Raphael McManus (2006). “Uprising: A Revolution of the Soul”, p.210, Thomas Nelson Inc

“Maybe the biggest problem with loneliness is that we walk around thinking we're the only ones suffering from it.”

“I am tired to death! tired of every thing! I would give the universe for a disposition less difficult to please. Yet, after all, what is there to give pleasure? When one has seen one thing, one has seen every thing.”

“I chose Journalism by default. I always loved TV, and I had no idea what else to do, so I studied what interested me.”

“Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.”

Source : Douglas Sirk, Jon Halliday (1971). “Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday”, Harvill Secker