Nora Ephron

In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

Although the road is never ending, take a step and keep walking, do not look fearfully into the distance…on the path let the heart be your guide for the body is hesitant and full of fear.

We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.

We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

In the stillness of the mind I saw myself as I am – unbound.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.