"The mercantile business did not suit me"

“I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.”

Source : Richard Wright (1998). “Black Boy”, Turtleback

“Closed doors simply means God is protecting us from having not the best.”

“As academics we have pretty good judgment about the quality of institutions that cannot simply be measured by counting the number of papers published or patents received. Outsiders who swoop in to count beans and make up lists based on statistics have little sense of what excellence is.”

Source : Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

“Instead, the Nationals will pay Scherzer $15 million per season, but do so for 14 years; essentially, they’ve deferred half of each season’s salary seven years into the future.”

“Hollywood is just like high school. The popular people only like the other popular people. And the thing is, some people aren't nice - or they're nice, but only to your face, not elsewhere.”

“Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

Source : Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.238, Spectra

“The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.”

Source : National Book Foundation's BookUpNYC Interview, www.nationalbook.org.

“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.”