"It was a smile that spelled trouble. With a promise."

“When I told my doctor I couldn't afford an operation, he offered to touch-up my X-rays.”

“In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.”

“A girl who pays attention is very cool. It's really hard to pay attention to someone. I understand. I get it. I get bored a lot when I'm talking to people, but I try. So I'd like for the girl to try, too.”

Source : "Whitney's Chris D'Elia Is Back With More Relationship Advice". Interview with Annie Gabillet, www.popsugar.com. February 14, 2012.

“One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.”

“So we strive for perfection in the areas in which we can control, and that isn't necessarily what provides contentment and joy for ourselves and, more importantly, for our children.”

“Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.”

“The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education. It is inconceivable that any nation should achieve prosperity and success unless this paramount, this fundamental concern is carried forward. The principal reason for the decline and fall of peoples is ignorance. Today the mass of the people are uninformed even as to ordinary affairs, how much less do they grasp the core of the important problems and complex needs of the time.”

“Over recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing world.”

Source : Iain McGilchrist (2009). “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”, p.436, Yale University Press