"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
— Cyril Connolly

"I am always with myself, and it is I who am my tormentor."
— Leo Tolstoy

"If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them. (The Monk)"
— Matthew Gregory Lewis

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"And in the end it is not the years in your life that count,
It's the life in your years."
— Abraham Lincoln

"Right now I want a word that describes the feeling that you get--a cold sick feeling, deep down inside--when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you cant stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
— Abraham Lincoln

"I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand."
— Susan B. Anthony

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will."
— Charlotte Brontë

"You're only a man! You've not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!"
— Georgette Heyer (Powder and Patch)

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"When a man gives his opinion, he's a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch."
— Bette Davis

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver."
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Women and Economics)

"I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be truly disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."
— Anne Brontë

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time."
— Edith Wharton

"No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed."
— A.S. Byatt (Possession)

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
— Benjamin Franklin

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
-How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)"
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, Special 75th Anniversary Edition)

""She did as she felt, and she felt a great deal.""
— Kate Morton (The Forgotten Garden)

" There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been."
— A.S. Byatt

"I was raised right....to talk about people behind their backs....it's called manners. "
— Kathy Griffin

"Expect nothing and you'll always be surprised"
— Daniel Defoe