floccinaucinihilipilification

A coinage ... combining a number of roughly synonymous Latin stems. Latin flocci, from floccus, a wisp or piece of wool + nauci, from naucum, a trifle + nihili, from nihilum, nothing + pili, from pilus, a hair, something insignificant (all therefore having the sense of "worthless" or "nothing") + -fication.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/floccinaucinihilipilification

J. D. Salinger

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Holden Caulfield's opening statement in The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

William Faulkner

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
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William Faulkner

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
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William Faulkner

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
Requiem for a Nun (1951)

William Shakespeare

...Great floods have flown
From simple sources; and great seas have dried,
When miracles have by the greatest been denied.
Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises.
All's Well That Ends Well, Helena, scene i

Flannery O'Connor

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

Giordano Bruno

In a dialogue that Bruno wrote in the 1570s he imagines his home town of Nola in which fate has decreed...
that Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl her hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won’t burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio’s foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim’s progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. . . . Antonio Savolino’s bitch shall conceive five puppies, of which three shall live out their natural lifespan and two shall be thrown away, and of these three the first shall resemble its mother, the second shall be mongrel, and the third shall partly resemble the father and partly resemble Polidoro’s dog. . . . Paulino, when he bends over to pick up a broken needle, shall snap the red drawstring of his underpants, and if he should blaspheme for that reason, I mean for him to be punished thus: tonight his soup shall be too salty and taste of smoke, he shall fall and break his wine flask.
Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600) was an Italian philosopher, priest, cosmologist, and occultist. A statue of Bruno was erected in Campo de' Fiori in Rome in 1889.