"We mutinied quietly, using every lesson we’d been taught by every person who’d ever used us for their own benefit."
— Laura Wiess (Leftovers)

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing."
— Markus Zusak

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"... I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Why are you leaving me?
He wrote, I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.
There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"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

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"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

"All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States -- and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"We could have saved [the Earth] but we were too damned cheap."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"I wanted all things to seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense.
And I made up lies, so
they all fit nice,
and I made this sad world
a paradise"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"He was talking about the sign that said 'THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE.'
'All knew was that I didn't want my daughter or anybody's child to see a message that negative every time she comes into the library,' he said. 'And then I found out it was you who was responsible for it.'
'What's so negative about it?' I said.
'What could be a more negative word than "futility"?' he said.
'"Ignorance,"' I said."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Just because you can read, write and do a little math, doesn't mean that you're entitled to conquer the universe."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Hocus Pocus)

"The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"I now believe that the only way in which Americans can rise above their ordinariness, can mature sufficiently to rescue themselves and to help rescue their planet, is through enthusiastic intimacy with works of their own imagination."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"There is no WHY, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in Amber."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Bluebeard)

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"On the day they dropped the bomb Frank had a tablespoon and a Mason jar. What he was doing was spooning different kinds of bugs into the jar and making them fight....I can remember other bug fights we staged later on...They won't fight unless you keep shaking the jar."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"It is so short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligent to say after a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead...everything is supposed to be very quiet...and it always is, except for the birds."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."

"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"'If it weren't for the people, the god-damn people' said Finnerty, 'always getting tangled up in the machinery. If it weren't for them, the world would be an engineer's paradise.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano)

"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt.
"Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired.
"Very good answer."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think that money was so valuable?"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The Fourteenth Book is entitled, "What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.
This is it: "Nothing."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"People who claim they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of. "
— Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West)

"Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!"
— Emily Brontë

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"Why did you betray your own heart Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. ... You loved me - then what right had you to leave me? Because ... nothing God or satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of you own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - oh God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave? [...] I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?"
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco. "
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)