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WILLIAM FAULKNER:

People need trouble— a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rathole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.

Sclcaed Letters of William Faulkner (Random House)

MALCOLM 5. FORBES, JR.:

It says something about the capacity of government to manage the health­care system when a private publisher had a 192-page summary of the Clinton health plan in bookstores for more than a month, while only a 32-page summary was available_from the Government Printing Office.

—Forbes

VACLAV HAVEL

Hope is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to suc­ceed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It's not the convic­tion that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem hopeless. Life is too precious to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emp­tily, without meaning, without love and, finally, without hope.

—Disturbing the Peace (Knopf)

DONALD HALL:

The sight of a_grave-stone7we!ghty~not only in its granite, allows us perspective on problems as pressing as burnt toast, taxes and hay fever.

—Harrowsmith Country Life

EDGAR LEE MASTERS:

Genius is a bend in the creek where bright water has gathered, and which mirrors the trees, the sky and the banks. It just does that because it is there and the scenery is there. Talent is a fine mir­ror with a silver frame, with the name of the owner engraved on the back.

—Quoted by H. E. Richardson in The Biography of an American Writer: Jesse Hilton Stuart (McGraw-Hill)

HERBERT AGAR:

Snobs talk as if they had begotten their own ancestors.

AARON WILDAVSKY:

Self-esteem cannot be sought as an end in itself but must come as a byprod­uct of meeting standards of excellence— taking pride in work, supporting a family, bringing up decent children, learning aoout life and imparting that

wisdom.                                         — Vie Public Interest

JOHN MUIR:

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloam­ing, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

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