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“I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn’t,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn’t a-been so cold
I might’ve sunk and died.

But it was      Cold in that water!      It was cold!

I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby
And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn’t a-been so high
I might’ve jumped and died.

But it was      High up there!      It was high!

So since I’m still here livin’,
I guess I will live on.
I could’ve died for love—
But for livin’ I was born

Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry—
I’ll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine!      Fine as wine!      Life is fine!"

-Langston Hughes

“One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.”

-Jean-Paul Sartre

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”

-Robert Frost

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”

-Kurt Vonnegut

“And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that’s just another kind of dream.”

-Fernando Pessoa

“Like madness is the glory of this life
As this pomp shows to a little oil and root.”

-William Shakespeare, The Life of Timon of Athens

”...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people – their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties..if that is what they mean by a “liberal” then I am proud to be a liberal.”

-John F Kennedy

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? . . . [W]e need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

-Franz Kafka

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”

-George Bernard Shaw

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?”

-William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech