Opportunity and Success

Recently I’ve begun to think that quotes from intelligent people would be perfect as an epigraph for either my own or anyone else’s novel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraph_(literature), an epigraph being a little quote on the opening page right before a novel starts.  With the right epigraph I’d immediately establish a warm, sympathetic, intelligent tone.  So far I can’t find the exact words. But I am confident that somewhere, tucked away, I’ll find it.  Meanwhile, I’ve been accumulating quotes perfect for books I’m not writing. So I’ll pass them along and feel free to take them.

Oedipus: “The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.”

Voltaire: God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.”

Eleanor Roosevelt: “Perhaps we have to learn that life was not meant to be lived in security but with adventurous courage.”

Eleanor Roosevelt: “It is often said that friendship and loyalty are the petty illusions and dreams of youth and that as one grows older, one gives them up and forgets them, but this seems wrong, for the greatest men and women are those who have been loyal and honest and have believed in friendship to the end.”

Bernard Selling: “Sometimes the only real truth is each person’s perception of it.”

Peter Ackroyd: “If there is one aspect of a writer’s life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood.”

Margaret Robison: “The soul has to have a place to come home to.”

Lucille Clifton: “I write the way I write because I am the kind of person I am.”

Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

Stephen King: “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”

Anyone have a quote they want to share that would make a good epigraph?