"I saw the sky and sea and sand and the flickering flames of the bonfire through my tears. All at once, it rushed into my head with tremendous speed, and made me feel dizzy. It was beautiful. Everything that happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy."
— Banana Yoshimoto (N.P.)

"If you're feeling helpless, help someone. "
— Aung San Suu Kyi

"Activism is my rent for living on the planet."
— Alice Walker

"Know all the Questions, but not the Answers
Look for the Different, instead of the Same
Never Walk where there's room for Running
Don't do anything that can't be a Game"
— Zilpha Keatley Snyder (The Changeling)

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
— Anne Frank

"There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for sure certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can."
— Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

"Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. "
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence."
— Salman Rushdie

"It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin."
— Alexander McCall Smith

"The world is so full of a number of things, I ’m sure we should all be as happy as kings."
— Robert Louis Stevenson

"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it."
— Terry Pratchett (Monstrous Regiment)

"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."
— Salman Rushdie

"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on."
— Benjamin Franklin

"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."
— Thomas Jefferson

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
— Walt Whitman

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace."
— Leonard Koren (Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers)

"I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness."
— Banana Yoshimoto (Kitchen)

"She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four."
— Gloria Naylor (Mama Day)

"A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs."
— Francesca Lia Block

"Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power."
— Salman Rushdie

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)