"What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy."
— George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones)

"When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety is gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"We have art in order not to die of the truth. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."
— Joseph Campbell

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."
— Joseph Campbell

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
— Joseph Campbell

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads."
— Erica Jong

"Achilles: I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
"
— Homer (The Iliad)

"Political movements for justice are part of the fuller development of the cosmos, and nature is the matrix in which humans come to their self-awareness of their power to transform. Liberation movements are a fuller development of the cosmos's sense of harmony, balance, justice, and celebration. This is why true spiritual liberation demands rituals of cosmic celebrating and healing, which will in turn culminate in personal transformation and liberation."
— Matthew Fox (Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality Presented in Four Paths, Twenty-Six Themes, and Two Questions)

"Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come."
— Julian of Norwich

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth."
— Tim O'Brien

"When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us."
— bell hooks

"For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?"
— bell hooks

"I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all."
— Alan Moore

"Thus far the mighty mystery of motherhood is this: How is it that doing it all feels like nothing is ever getting done.
"
— Rebecca Woolf

"Advice to friends. Advice to fellow mothers in the same boat. "How do you do it all?" Crack a joke. Make it seem easy. Make everything seem easy. Make life seem easy and parenthood and marriage and freelancing for pennies, writing a novel and smiling after a rejection, keeping the faith after two, reminding oneself that four years of work counted for a lot, counted for everything. Make the bed. Make it nice. Make the people laugh when you sit down to write and if you can't make them laugh make them cry. Make them want to hug you or hold you or punch you in the face. Make them want to kill you or fuck you or be your friend. Make them change. Make them happy. Make the baby smile. Make him laugh. Make him dinner. Make him proud.

Hold the phone, someone is on the other line. She says its important. People are dying. Children. Friends. Press mute because there is nothing you can say. Press off because you're running out of minutes. Running out of time. Soon he'll be grown up and you'll regret the time you spent pushing him away for one more paragraph in the manuscript no one will ever read. Put down the book, the computer, the ideas. Remember who you are now. Wait. Remember who you were. Wait. Remember what's important. Make a list. Ten things, no twenty. Twenty thousand things you want to do before you die but what if tomorrow never comes? No one will remember. No one will know. No one will laugh or cry or make the bed. No one will have a clue which songs to sing to the baby. No one will be there for the children. No one will finish the first draft of the novel. No one will publish the one that's been finished for months. No one will remember the thought you had last night, that great idea you forgot to write down."
— Rebecca Woolf

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality."
— Dante Alighieri (Inferno)

"In order to be able to make it, you have to put aside the fear of failing and the desire of succeeding. You have to do these things completely and purely without fear, without desire. Because things that we do without lust or result are the purest actions we shall ever take."
— Alan Moore

"forgiveness is not a single act, but a matter of constant practice"
— Diana Gabaldon (Drums of Autumn)

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"It is argued that because they believed thoroughly in a just, moral God they could put their faith there and let the smaller securities take care of themselves. But I think that because they trusted themselves and respected themselves as individuals, because they knew beyond doubt that they were valuable and potentially moral units - because of this they could give God their own courage and dignity and then receive it back. Such things have disappeared perhaps because men do not trust themselves any more, and when that happens there is nothing left except perhaps to find some strong sure man, even though he may be wrong, and to dangle from his coattails."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy - that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart."
— Niel Gaiman

"Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
"
— Ray Bradbury

"The ways of sin are curious . . . I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"'You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.'"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"'Do you take pride in your hurt?' Samuel asked. 'Does it make you seem large and tragic? . . . Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience . . . there's all that fallow land, and here beside me is all that fallow man. It seems a waste. And I have a bad feeling about waste because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let your life lie fallow?'"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"'I believe . . . that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I'll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer's sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered; or becomes a bird, flaps its tail, shakes out its feathers, puffs itself up, laughs, flies away. You probably don't appreciate letters like that, very much, do you, Narcissus? But I say: with them God wrote the world.'"
— Hermann Hesse (Narcissus and Goldmund)

"Love begins with a metaphor . . . Which is to say love begins when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
— Milan Kundera

"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do."
— Hermann Hesse (Narcissus and Goldmund)

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
— Rachel Carson

"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility. "
— Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile occupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength."
— Rachel Carson

""I am the most unhappy soul alive."

"I'd heard it said that fairies have no souls."

"Then do I ache, and bleed, and smart, elsewhere; still, call it soul for it is solely mine.""
— Neil Gaiman

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
— Anaïs Nin

"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
— Anaïs Nin

"Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced
life."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in."
— Mother Teresa

"Is the work of sun worshippers to honor those who think they can see the sun? Or to worship the sun?"
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"Words in books can remind us of truth, and help awaken us to it. But in themselves, words are just paint and writers are just painters . . . Let us not overestimate the power of any form of literature."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"The only way I know to pluck from the hearts of enemies their desire to destroy us is to remove from their lives the sense that, for their own physical and spiritual survival, they must."
— David James Duncan (God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right)

"The only truly prominent community that fundamentalists have so far established in any world, real or imaginary, is hell."
— Mark Twain

"Have a great love for those who contradict and fail to love you, for in this way love is begotten in a heart that has no love."
— John of the Cross