"You stay out here a little while, an' if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too."
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus

"You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.'"
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Do we look like thrill-seekers? Wasn't it enough that we had to put up that sign reading NO HABLA ESPANOL and acknowledge the existence of thirty percent of the population, even in the negative?"
— Christopher Moore

"There's no direction I can go in. If I met someone else, what meaning would there be left? If the pain goes, does that mean I never loved her? How can I get over it? I can't, I mustn't. But what else am I going to do?"
— Marie Phillips (Gods Behaving Badly: A Novel)

"You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came line an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You are like all tha they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrrow, for all eternity. I am not a cowaqrd; I was afraid cause I lovey ou more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid before."
— Willa Cather

"Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived."
— Willa Cather

"The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door."
— Christopher Moore

"I've seen more intelligence in the crotch lice of harem whores."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)

"Charlie Asher: I accidently shagged a monk last night.
Minty Fresh: Sometimes, in times of crisis, that shit cannot be avoided.""
— Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job)

"Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it."
— Kevin Brockmeier (The Brief History of the Dead)

"Last time I really got to know myself it turned out there was a whole gang of bitches in there to deal with. I felt like the receptionist at a rehab center. They all had nice tits though, I gotta say."
— Christopher Moore

"They want to be tied up, I tie them up. They want to be spanked, I spank them. They want to be called names, I call them names. But try and drink a little of their blood, and they scream like babies. What about my needs?"
— Christopher Moore

"The gourney, the big file drawers of the dead, the instruments of dissection - this sure looked like the morgues in the movies. Something had gone seriously wrong while she slept."
— Christopher Moore

"We don't know what we'd do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan."
— Francine Prose (Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas)

"Violence up close has a smell. Like copper blood and charcoal burning."
— Jodi Picoult

"Rub-a-dub-dub. Cerebrum in a tub."
— Dean Koontz

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors."
— Dean Koontz

"Life's only obligation, afterall, was to be interesting."
— Jeff Lindsay (Darkly Dreaming Dexter)

"Getting yelled at by a furious woman should be a semi-formal occasion."
— Jeff Lindsay (Darkly Dreaming Dexter)

"I feel the way bank robbers must feel before they go out on that last job that ends up getting them all killed. That is to say, optimistic."
— Joey Comeau (Lockpick Pornography)

"Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway