"sometimes you don't need a goal in life, you don't need to know the big picture. you just need to know what you're going to do next!"
— Sophie Kinsella (The Undomestic Goddess)

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I walked over to the hill where we used to go and sled. There were a lot of little kids there. I watched them flying. Doing jumps and having races. And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to...nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?"
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city."
— Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)

"People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"That’s what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"What's the world's greatest lie?... It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate."
— Paulo Coelho

"When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true."
— Paulo Coelho

"Life is too short, or too long, for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly."
— Paulo Coelho

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity."
— Gilda Radner

"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
— Lily Tomlin

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to...

- Frodo to Sam"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?"
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"I've got nothing to do today but smile."
— Simon and Garfunkel

"Happiness is a place between too little and too much."
— Finnish Proverb

"It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy. "
— Lucille Ball

"They say - "they" being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times."
— Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed)

"It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"If you done it, it ain't bragging."
— Walt Whitman

"I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. "
— Walt Whitman

"I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. "
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

""What did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think. I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.""
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I've always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments."
— John Barrowman

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle."
— Lewis Carroll

"Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass)

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies)

"[My guru] says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
— Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)

"The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm not sure who the first person was who said that. Probably Shakespeare. Or maybe Sting. But at the moment, it's the sentence that best explains my tragic flaw, my inability to change. I don't think I'm alone in this. The more I get to know other people, the more I realize it's kind of everyone's flaw. Staying exactly the same for as long as possible, standing perfectly still... It feels safer somehow. And if you are suffering, at least the pain is familiar. Because if you took that leap of faith, went outside the box, did something unexpected... Who knows what other pain might be out there, waiting for you. Chances are it could be even worse. So you maintain the status quo. Choose the road already traveled and it doesn't seem that bad. Not as far as flaws go. You're not a drug addict. You're not killing anyone... Except maybe yourself a little. When we finally do change, I don't think it happens like an earthquake or an explosion, where all of a sudden we're like this different person. I think it's smaller than that. The kind of thing most people wouldn't even notice unless they looked at us really close. Which, thank God, they never do. But you notice it. Inside you that change feels like a world of difference. And you hope this is it. This is the person you get to be forever... that you'll never have to change again."
— Laura J. Burns

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
— Mary Anne Radmacher

"People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt."
— Charles M. Schulz

"Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.

Ten True Things"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired - as furniture sanders - we could not believe this was really what people did all day. Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job. Each line on the sidewalk, each saltine. Everyone had a rotting carpet and a door to pay for. Aghast, we quit. There had to be a more dignified way to live. We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music.

Something That Needs Nothing"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren't we all."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life."
— Oscar Wilde

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on."
— Henry Rollins

"Your life is an occasion. Rise to it."
— Suzanne Weyn (Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium)