Here, once again, is a selection of quotations for Sunday. You all have made my job much easier this week as most of these quotations were sent to me directly. Please feel free to continue to do so. I'll try to post as many as I can. 

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 We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task ... The rest is the madness of art.

Henry James

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Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

Groucho Marx

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The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.

Charles Bukowski

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It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

James Thurber

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Great souls by instinct to each other turn,
Demand alliance, and in friendship burn. 

Joseph Addison

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If you're travelling at the speed of light, and you turn on your headlights... what happens?

Steven Wright

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There are no right answers. But there is a right question. It's the one that rubs up against our self-righteousness, resistance, and fears...When you ask yourself 'Why not?' you may find yourself in motion, across a vivid and unpredictable landscape, over impossible mountains and beyond water's edge, where you surprise yourself, once and for all, by getting wet.

Karen Maezen Miller

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The Purist

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

Ogden Nash

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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing

Edmund Burke

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...a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?

Robert Browning

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We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

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I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

Woody Allen

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I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.

Groucho Marx

By limiting or denying freedom of speech and expression, we take away a lot of potential. We take away thoughts and ieas before they even have the opportunity to hatch. We build a world around negatives -- you can't say, think, or do this or that. We teach that if you are safely camouflaged in what is acceptable and walk that narrow road -- benign or neutral words, membership in institutions where we are told what to think and believe -- then you can get away with a lot of things. You can deny who you are and all that came before you and still be thought of as a good person. And what can be positive in that? In fact, what is more positive than a child with an individual mind full of thoughts and sounds and the need to express them who has the freedom to discover under safe and accommodating conditions the best way to communicate something? In other words, you old son of a bitch, I say Let freedom ring!

Jill McCorkle, "Cuss Time," included in this year's The Best American Essays. (an essay I had my students read this week)