"Everyone appreciates being appreciated!"

“Perhaps many of us do not like it where we are in the universe now, but we can all be certain that we got where we are -our own decisions to expand in love or withdraw from it.”

“Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save--as you prefer--the King or Ireland. The land of scholars and saints: Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush, Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints”

Source : Louis MacNeice (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.176, Faber & Faber

“Can you think of anything more permanently elating than to know that you are on the right road at last?”

“Character is a strange blending of flinty strength and pliable warmth.”

“Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath. Yet, tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling. But forests do not need this godlike interference... Planting tree plantations is permanent deforestation... The extensive planting of just one exotic species removes thousands of native species.”

“Isn't the first story told in the West about the Fall? Adam and Eve were immigrants too from somewhere, a lost Eden, a paradise lost. We all now are so mobile, so nomadic .”

Source : "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

“there is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.”

“When you have too many beers, you become like a control freak on everything.”