Sherry

“For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

“What would you tell her about me?”
He did not just ask that.
“You did not just ask that.” She chuckled.
“I’m serious,” he smiled.
“Very well, if you must know, I would say that you are arrogant and foolish, too handsome for your own good and far too cognizant of your own intellect. Unbending, unsympathetic, dogmatic, pig-headed—”
“Handsome?” he interrupted, unable to keep the smile from his face. “And intelligent?”
“Don’t forget arrogant.”
― Leigh LaValle, The Runaway Countess

“Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.”
― Bruce Lee

“I go on the presumption that everyone's full of shit until proven otherwise, and this usually serves me in good stead.”
― Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War