"He made me love him without looking at me."
— Charlotte Brontë

"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour: stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth - so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane"
— Charlotte Brontë

"'I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.' -Jane Eyre"
— Charlotte Brontë

"I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds."
— Quentin Crisp

"If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable."
— Quentin Crisp

"Muddled syntax is the outward and audible sign of confused minds, and the misuse of grammar the result of illogical thinking."
— Quentin Crisp

"First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up. ..."
— Jean Genet

"She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . . "
— Jean Genet (Querelle)

"The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they draw their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them."
— Jean Genet (Querelle)

"In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you--on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck--even then. And afterwards--perhaps most of all afterwards--I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B...without looking, or, without lifting the pencil...or in some other way...we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Invitation to a Beheading)

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Dear Jesus, do something."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges.""
— Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle)

"The sky was so heartless and dark, and her body, her head, and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes -- telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression -- that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle)

"What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting."
— Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel)

"And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Applause is the beginning of abuse"
— Ted Hughes

"As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
"
— Toni Morrison

"There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick."
— Toni Morrison

"They sicken of the calm who know the storm."
— Dorothy Parker

"That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment."
— Dorothy Parker

"Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both."
— Dorothy Parker

"Don't look at me in that tone of voice."
— Dorothy Parker

"Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play.""
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"We can only know God well when we know our own sin. And those who have known God without knowing their wretchedness have not glorified Him but have glorified themselves."
— Blaise Pascal

"all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"
— Blaise Pascal

"By space the universe encompasses me and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world."
— Blaise Pascal

"Hurt, he'll never be hurt--he's made to hurt other people."
— George Eliot (Silas Marner)

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
— Edith Wharton

"What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding it's breath."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting."
— Edith Wharton

"She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.'"
— Edith Wharton

"To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."
— Karl Barth

"When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light."
— Martin Buber

"As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals."
— Martin Buber

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. "
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned.
Adult. You have become adult.
-- From the title story "Paingod"
— Harlan Ellison (Paingod and Other Delusions)

"I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid"
— Harlan Ellison

"K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere."
— Harlan Ellison

"I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept."
— Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere)

"Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you."
— Neil Gaiman