"The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving."
— Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

"I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable."
— Woody Allen (Annie Hall)

"My one regret in life is that I am not someone else."
— Woody Allen

"Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

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

"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."
— Dorothy Parker

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

"Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves."
— Dorothy Parker

"Drink and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die (but alas we never do)!"
— Dorothy Parker (The Portable Dorothy Parker)

"No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

- Nick Carroway"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
— Anaïs Nin

"I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you."
— Anaïs Nin

"my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world."
— Charles Bukowski

"Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spiritual qualities."
— Charles Bukowski

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
— Mark Twain

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
— J.D. Salinger

"I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy"
— J.D. Salinger

"I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met."
— David Sedaris

"No one who is young is ever going to be old."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?"
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)