If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire—then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. – Sigmund Wollman, quoted by Robert Fulghum, Uh-Oh, 1991
Among the notable things about fire is that it also requires oxygen to burn – exactly like its enemy, life. Thereby are life and flames so often compared. – Otto Weininger
[W]oods are filled with the music of birds, and all nature is laughing under the glorious influence of Summer. – Charles Lanman, “The Dying Year,” 1840
We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
