Once you have tasted flight you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return --Leonardo DaVinci

Amid the uncertainty there are certain ideas that are so powerful and so right that you can hold onto them no matter how screwed up everything else is. --David "The Edge" Evans

The struggle is always worthwhile, if the end be worthwhile and the means honorable; foreknowledge of defeat is not sufficient reason to withdraw from the contest --Steven Brust "Pheonix Guards"

I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on, I am your teacher. --Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game"

As it always will, the past will break free of any effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took. --Robin Hobb "Fool's Errand"