"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."
— Mark Twain

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."
— Kahlil Gibrán (The Prophet)

"Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Love one another,
but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between
the shores of your souls."
— Kahlil Gibrán (Love Letters in the Sand: The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran)

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

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

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."
— Ayn Rand

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
— Ayn Rand

"This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It’s a place that does not exist."
— Alessandro Baricco (Ocean Sea)

"Although he had used it very sparingly, the perfume that he had mixed in Montpellier was slowly was slowly running out. He created a new one. But this time he was not content simply to imitate basic human odor by hastily tossing together some ingredients; he made it a matter of pride to acquire a personal odor, or better yet, a number of personal odors...
Protected by these various odors, which he changed like clothes as the situation demanded and which permitted him to move undisturbed in the world of men and to keep his true nature from them, Grenouille devoted himself to his real passion: the subtle pursuit of scent."
— Patrick Süskind

"We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love."
— Tom Robbins

"Sometimes the right thing feels all wrong until it is over and done with."
— Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework."
— Françoise Sagan

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"People change and forget to tell each other."
— Lillian Hellman

"It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength. "
— Mary Stewart (The Hollow Hills)

"Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about."
— Tom Wolfe

"Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story."
— Margaret Atwood

"Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."
— Margaret Atwood

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. "
— Philip K. Dick

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."
— Sun Tzu

"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

"I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it."
— Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1)

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
— Flannery O'Connor

"You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."
— Harlan Ellison

"ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

"A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board"
— D.H. Lawrence

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing."
— Gertrude Stein