William Collins Quotes
English - Poet December 25, 1721 - June 12, 1759

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.
William Collins

By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung.
William Collins

Always mistrust a subordinate who never finds fault with his superior.
William Collins

I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.
William Collins

How sleep the brave,
who sink to rest,
By all their country's
wishes blest!
William Collins

In numbers
warmly pure
and sweetly strong.
William Collins

Beloved, till life can charm no more;
And mourned, till Pity's self be dead.
William Collins

Words like feminism or democracy scare me. They are words with barnacles on them, and you can't see what's underneath.
William Collins

Prior to Wordsworth, humor was an essential part of poetry. I mean, they don't call them Shakespeare comedies for nothing.
William Collins


Clara Barton Quotes
American - Public Servant December 25, 1821 - April 12, 1912

I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.
Clara Barton

This conflict is one thing I've been waiting for. I'm well and strong and young - young enough to go to the front. If I can't be a soldier, I'll help soldiers.
Clara Barton

I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.
Clara Barton

The surest test of discipline is its absence.
Clara Barton

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.
Clara Barton

Everybody's business is nobody's business, and nobody's business is my business.
Clara Barton

An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.
Clara Barton

A ball had passed between my body and the right arm which supported him, cutting through the sleeve and passing through his chest from shoulder to shoulder. There was no more to be done for him and I left him to his rest. I have never mended that hole in my sleeve.
Clara Barton

I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?
Clara Barton

The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.
Clara Barton

Economy, prudence, and a simple life are the sure masters of need, and will often accomplish that which, their opposites, with a fortune at hand, will fail to do.
Clara Barton


Cab Calloway Quotes
American - Musician December 25, 1907 - November 18, 1994

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody's interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.
Cab Calloway

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.
Cab Calloway

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it, was all for my audience.
Cab Calloway

It's very difficult to photograph an opera. And they messed up on it. It just wasn't there. And I don't blame the Gershwins for taking it away. Of course, if they had gotten the original company to have done it, it would have been very good.
Cab Calloway

Bubbles was a very good dancer. Tremendous dancer. He was one of our leading dancers of the country at that time. And, of course, he didn't have much of a voice.
Cab Calloway

You don't think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What - doesn't make a difference! Doesn't make a difference. I think he did a good job.
Cab Calloway

We didn't have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free.
Cab Calloway

We usually never got out of there before four or five o'clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.
Cab Calloway

A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don't do that on stage.
Cab Calloway

At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.
Cab Calloway

He was a silly guy. Out - do the other guy. That was his effort at all times.
Cab Calloway

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.
Cab Calloway

That's what George wrote! He wrote it. Why change it? There was this European company that I was speaking about awhile ago - course, didn't nobody know what Porgy was.
Cab Calloway

I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.
Cab Calloway

The only credit I can give them. They synchronize wonderful. That's all. They synchronize very - you would have thought that they were actually acting, but they were synching all the time, and that's a rough job.
Cab Calloway

What opera isn't violent? Two things happen, violence and love. And other than that, name something else. You can't.
Cab Calloway


Quentin Crisp Quotes
English - Writer December 25, 1908 - November 21, 1999

If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.
Quentin Crisp

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
Quentin Crisp

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
Quentin Crisp

I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.
Quentin Crisp

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough.
Quentin Crisp

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
Quentin Crisp

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.
Quentin Crisp

Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone - but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, too yielding.
Quentin Crisp

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.
Quentin Crisp

The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
Quentin Crisp

The trouble with children is that they're not returnable.
Quentin Crisp

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.
Quentin Crisp

There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
Quentin Crisp

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Quentin Crisp

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp

Manners are love in a cool climate.
Quentin Crisp

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.
Quentin Crisp

Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh.
Quentin Crisp

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
Quentin Crisp

For an introvert his environment is himself and can never be subject to startling or unforeseen change.
Quentin Crisp

However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.
Quentin Crisp

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
Quentin Crisp

The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
Quentin Crisp

Health consists of having the same diseases as one's neighbors.
Quentin Crisp

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.
Quentin Crisp

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.
Quentin Crisp

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
Quentin Crisp

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
Quentin Crisp

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp

Abatement in the hostility of one's enemies must never be thought to signify they have been won over. It only means that one has ceased to constitute a threat.
Quentin Crisp

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp

Men get laid, but women get screwed.
Quentin Crisp

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.
Quentin Crisp

For flavor, instant sex will never supersede the stuff you have to peel and cook.
Quentin Crisp

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp

Sex is the last refuge of the miserable.
Quentin Crisp

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.
Quentin Crisp

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.
Quentin Crisp

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
Quentin Crisp

Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
Quentin Crisp

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?
Quentin Crisp