"I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this."
— William Boyd (Restless)

"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

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didnt believe in that.
Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.
It didnt even know they were there."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb...," He murmured.
"What a stupid lamb, " I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion."
— Stephenie Meyer

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

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

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart, but really with it, and in it."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud..."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"Once he reached the farm he followed a barely used dirt road that led towards the sandstone cliffs. He heard the dog scrabbling across the rocky ground. The huffling of her breath. Some of the rocks were quite large and he turned and watched her stumble into them. In terrain like this she could easily break a leg and yet she lurched on, determined to find him. When she finally reached him she touched his leg with her nose, before settling down a few feet away, blind head looking out of over the dry Limpopo below. He wished he could pluck out her eyes and hold them in his hands like marbles. Rub them together, make thunder, bring rain. Instead he nudged the safety catch off his rifle and shot her."
— Lisa Fugard (Skinner's Drift: A Novel)

"She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was blurred, receding against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

"This is what you remember about him: not much, but then you have been assiduous in your forgetting. His red sweater, v-neck, cashmere; the clink of ice-cubes in a glass. He is shadow and voice, but you cannot recall his face. He is behind a closed door, in a forbidden room. He is asleep in his armchair, he is asleep in the driveway, asleep in your sandpit, face down, snoring but not harmless, even then. He is shouting, he is whispering, he is close but also remote as if at the end of a long hallway and you cannot hear him. His words never make any sense, he speaks some other language. His hands sometimes spin away from him like windmills, like pinwheels and Catherine wheels, snapping like firecrackers. There must be pain, but you cannot feel it.

Your skin bruises like apples."
— Melanie Finn (Away from You)

"My mind swirled with memories of the life I had led. The constant struggle to keep up appearances, the pretenses, the smiles that had been met with tears. The long sleepless nights, the loneliness that cloaked my spirit and turned me into a true ghost."
— Anchee Min

"There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"There's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [...] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"Truth is truth, you are who you are, and though your viewpoint might change, and though you might possess a different perspective about something, your heart and what you believe and who you are inside is only ever you...and you have to follow your heart, you have to believe what you're doing is right, and no matter what anyone might say or think or do you have to trust yourself to make the right decision."
— R.J. Ellory (Candlemoth)

"I am not gone but merely walk within you."
— Nicholas Evans (The Smoke Jumper)

"I guess that’s all forever is...Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now."
— Nicholas Evans (The Horse Whisperer)

"The ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together..."
— Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it"
— Nicholas Sparks (A Walk to Remember)

"An ordinary beginning, something that would have been forgotten had it been anyone but her. But as he shook her hand and met those striking emerald eyes, he knew before he'd taken his next breath that she was the one he could spend the rest of his life looking for but never find again. She seemed that good, that perfect, while a summer wind blew through the trees."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love."
— Nicholas Sparks

"The emptiness is so intense, that anything which enters it leaves a trace, something of it remains in space: in the silence, in the whiteness, nothingness becomes peopled, too."
— Marie Darrieussecq (White)

"I wake up at night with nowehere to go, no promises to keep and no whispers any more."
— Natasha Illum Berg (Tea on the Blue Sofa: Whispers of Love and Longing from Africa)

"So long and thanks...for all the fish!"
— Douglas Adams

"...release your hearts, alert your senses and pay attention. A leaf, a star, a song, a laugh. Notice the little things, because somebody is reaching out to you. Qualcuno ti ama. Somebody loves you."
— Ben Sherwood (The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud)

"What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding it's breath."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"Be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains."
— Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die: A Novel of Redemption)

"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)

"Thought I saw you on the beach this morning...Thought I saw you standing on the white strand, your back to the wind. The rain had stopped and there was a brisk clarity in the air. You watched me over your left shoulder, head tucked in coyly. Seabirds flying low in the sky, and the grey-green waves at your foot. A whole panorama thrown up behind you.

I was on the coast road coming back from the shops. I stopped walking once I caught sight of you. You were wearing a reefer jacket with the collar turned up against the weather. It might have been navy, but it looked black in the distance. As did your trousers. As did your shoes. All of you was black except your face and hair. You wore no hat...Never once saw you in Winter clothes, yet there you were as clear as day for a whole moment. Only your eyes were visible above the upturned collar. Your hair was in your eyes. You watched me through those pale strands. And I watched you. Intently.

The man from down the road drove by in his faded red car. He was going the other way, so he didn't offer a lift. He just waved. I waved back. And then I turned to you again, and we looked at each other a little longer. Very calm. Heart barely shifted. Too far away to see your features. No matter. There was salt on your face. Sea salt. It was in your hair. It was on your mouth. It was all over you, as though you gazed at me through ice. And it was all over me. It tingled on my skin.

After a time I moved off, and you broke into two. You realigned yourself into driftwood and stone. I came inside and lit a fire. Sat in front of it and watched it burn. The window fogged up as my clothes and hair dried out. That was hours ago. The fire is nearly gone. But I can still taste the salt on my lips. It is a dry and stinging substance and it is everywhere now. It has touched everything that is left. Coated every surface with its sparkling silt.

I will always be thirsty."
— Claire Kilroy (All Summer)

"Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"I learn from my own daughter that you don’t have to be awake to cry."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"You dont love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch."
— Jodi Picoult

"Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, "You have no need for sight. Listen."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"I want to clean myself like the window of a house, make myself clear for things to pass through. Flat and quiet."
— Elizabeth Rosner (The Speed of Light)

"Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort.

So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. "
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"The child's face is close to her own now, but there is still no detail. It is a blur, a watercolor painting left out in the rain, the shades running, blending into one another. Only the eyes remain clear; black and hungry, jealous of life. "
— John Connolly (Bad Men: A Thriller)

"Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.

It took Ali’s breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave.

Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death.

Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. In her mind, she imagined Ike sitting in the raft across from her wearing a vast grin while the pyre reflected off the lenses of his glacier glasses. That put a smile on her face. In death, he had become the light.

There comes a time on every big mountain when you descend the snows and cross a border back to life. It is a first patch of green grass by the trail, or a waft of the forests far below, or the trickle of snowmelt braiding into a stream. Always before, whether he had been gone an hour or a week or much longer – and no matter how many mountains he had left behind – it was, for Ike, an instant that registered in his whole being. Ike was swept with a sense not of departure, but of advent. Not of survival. But of grace.
"
— Jeff Long (The Descent)

""It is most gratifying," it said, "that your enthusiasm for our planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are part of a special service we extend to all of our most enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom in future lives ... thank you.""
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)