My mom said I was an escapist at heart.... that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one

I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all...and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil.

A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!

The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.

Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possible one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting instincts. It will not let us go.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the Gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

It was a lame excuse, and I knew that wasn't the reason he was canceling. If he wanted to avoid me, I would have preferred he made up something about how he and the other guardians had to up Moroi security or practice top-secret ninja moves.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.

Industrialization based on machinery already referred to as a characteristic of our age is but one aspect of the revolution that is being wrought by technology.

The only thing I'm addicted to is winning. This bootleg cult arrogantly referred to as Alcoholics Anonymous reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100 percent.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas and I like that definition but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media but I would have preferred to work in peace.

Ninety percent of the students take the 'preferred lender.' Why? Because that's the nature of the relationship. You trust the school. The school is in a position of authority.

I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts 'cause they were cooler they had better taste in music for one thing I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!

Now I'm a wife and a mother of two. It's a really different role. I always referred to No Doubt as a marriage because that's what it's like to be together for so long and go through what we've been through. I can't really have that relationship with them anymore.

Both referred to the Affordable Care Act which is the accurate title of the health care reform law as 'Obamacare.' That is a disparaging reference to the President of the United States it is meant as a disparaging reference to the President of the United States.

Republicans would have preferred the court overturn the health care bill an act that would have underscored Obama's biggest liability - the perception among voters including those who like and trust him that he has been ineffective.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

Most men after a little freedom have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

I've always preferred food be on the blander side.

It's one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it - the better to preserve the good thing they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back.

I stupidly ignored education completely. I found it dull and I preferred to cause chaos and have fun. I regret this massively now.

We used to be referred to as bakers and then we became known as cake decorators and now we are known as cake designers. I teach at the French Culinary Institute in New York and cake design is a legitimate profession.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.