“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”

G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy

“The expression [“the Show Me State”] was coined as an insult by outsiders and was meant to suggest that Missourians were so stupid that they had to be shown how to do everything. The state’s inhabitants, however, contrarily took it as a compliment, persuading themselves that it implied a certain shrewd caution on their part.”

Bill Bryson Made in America

“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime [why the local roads are red]. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world. it wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”

Anne in Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people’s deaths. The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he’s just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!”

Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle in “a regretful letter” to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, shortly before his death at age 94, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Jan. 14, 2014 (apparently a spokesman for the Patriarch replied “If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it.”)

“Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed.”

The narrator in “The Whosis Kid” in Dashiell Hammett The Continental Op

“Fun and happiness are not synonymous. Happy people don’t need fun. Fun takes your mind off things.”

P.J. O’Rourke The Bachelor Home Companion

“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000