"Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
— Cormac McCarthy

"The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstitiion will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

That would be a hell of a zoo.

The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak."
— Larry McMurtry (In a Narrow Grave : Essays on Texas)

"Maybe you can make art out of unredeemed pain, but only if you're a genius -- Dostoyevsky perhaps."
— Larry McMurtry

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

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

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
— William Faulkner

"It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart."
— William Faulkner

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

"The most singular difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is a solid and joy a liquid."
— J.D. Salinger (Nine Stories)

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
— John Steinbeck

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

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading."
— Eudora Welty

"I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."
— Herman Melville

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy."
— William Faulkner

"My mother is a fish."
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"Wonder. Go on and wonder."
— William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"The future for me is already a thing of the past -
You were my first love and you will be my last"
— Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan: Love And Theft)

"Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be."
— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

"Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend."
— Aleksandar Hemon (Nowhere Man)

"All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is."
— Aleksandar Hemon (The Lazarus Project)

""Hi," she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it."
— Aleksandar Hemon (Nowhere Man)