The swimmer adrift on the open seas measures his strength, and strives with all his muscles to keep himself afloat. But what is he to do when there is no land on the horizon, and none beyond it?

Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

The person who comes up to you and makes the most noise and is the most intrusive is invariably the person in the room who has no respect for you at all, and it's really all about them.

People want to hear what I have to say and respect what I say.

My philosophy in life... is to prove myself to myself and not to others. I tried to teach my children that, that I have to respect myself, to prove to myself that I can do the best I can.

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.

Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.

Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

I'm a hopeless romantic with a dirty mind.

I did try to get a few of those teen high-school movies, but they just didn't like me. I guess I wasn't a certain type.

To me, romantic means, um, you follow your heart more than your mind. Sometimes when you're shooting a film, you have to follow your heart.

What's so great about inspiration is sometimes it finds you when you're not looking.

In our case, we have no script. So the only people we can work with are people who have been working with us in the past, and they know we are going to do something; it's kind of a trust.

'Ashes of Time' was my third film, and as a young director at that point, it's not very often that you have the chance to make a big martial arts film, so of course I jumped at this opportunity.

Sometimes, we have to turn our camera to a mirror to shoot something, and people think, 'Oh, that's very stylish.' Yes it is, but at the same time, we did it because we are shooting in a very small space, and that was our only option.

The original title for 'In the Mood for Love' was called 'A Story About Food.' The idea was to tell a love story through different courses.

Romantic lovers require from each other at least the facade of reason: We desire to be what romantic love makes us appear in the other's eyes. We want to imagine we are deserving of the love we inspire.

Europe, which gave us the idea of same-sex marriage, is a dying society, with birthrates 50 percent below replacement.

When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.

To imply that religious believers have no right to engage moral questions in the public square or at the ballot is simply to establish a Reichian secularism as our state faith.

I am such a sap when it comes to love! I believe in love at first sight all the way. But that's just the way it happened to me with my relationships. I love the idea of two people looking at each other and electricity flying around them; it's so romantic, and it's a great feeling.

I have dreams of becoming a professional pastry chef and having a little bakery - that's how much I love baking. I love to cook in general, but my heart lies in desserts.

I didn't grow up vegan or vegetarian. I grew up with junk food! And because of the way I ate before changing my diet, I can truly understand the challenges of making changes and stepping away from foods that provided a form of comfort and happiness growing up, but finding out that most of what I loved was really bad for me!

Breathless, we flung us on a windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it.

I'm into all that sappy stuff - a surprise picnic, nice dinner, or traveling. I'm kind of an old romantic.

Falling in love, romance, matters of the heart - when you fall in love, on some biochemical level you know there is a chance it won't work out. It's ingrained in us that if you take such an enormous risk on someone with your heart that it might not pay off. I gamble all my chips and I might actually lose everything.

There's nothing more romantic than Italian food.

The romantic love we feel toward the opposite sex is probably one extra help from God to bring you together, but that's it. All the rest of it, the true love, is the test.

All teenagers have this desire to somehow run away.

My dearly beloved if I am to die today and never see the sweet face of you I want you to know that I am no great man and am lucky to have such a woman as you.

This circus that's advertised to show and furnish a little amusement for us heathens is owned by a woman, one whose pluck catches my sympathy every time.

Savannah is amazing with the town squares and the hanging moss and the French Colonial houses. It's brutally romantic.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

Words of love, are works of love.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

After every storm the sun will smile; for every problem there is a solution, and the soul's indefeasible duty is to be of good cheer.

Vampires are so old that they don't need to impress anyone anymore. They're comfortable in their own skin. It's this enigmatic strength that's very romantic and old-fashioned. I think it goes back to something of a Victorian attitude of finding a strong man who's going to look after his woman.

Even if you know that what you'll say will hurt a woman's feelings, I've learned that it's better to be truthful with her than it is to cover up. Ultimate honesty is what a relationship is really about.

I think there are worse things for a teen to be enraptured with than 'Twilight.'

The romantic notion of the clubhouse as a traveling fraternity of working-class heroes - the boys of summer - is perhaps the most potent in all of baseball.

A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.