"I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly into imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look. These need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading'."
— Virginia Woolf

"Adlestrop

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

"
— Edward Thomas

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."
— Robert Frost

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
— Terry Pratchett (Thief of Time)

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it."
— Terry Pratchett

"The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues."
— Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"A day without sunshine is like, you know, night."
— Steve Martin

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
— Robert Frost

" Devotion

The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean-
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition. "
— Robert Frost

"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."
— Robert Frost

""Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world." "
— Robert Frost

"We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,--
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay)

""Oh! How like a woman," Davey said. "Sex, my dear Sadie, is not a sovereign cure for everything, you know. I only wish it were.""
— Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate: Two Novels)

"He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
— Thomas A. Edison

"Vision without execution is hallucination."
— Thomas A. Edison

"What you are will show in what you do."
— Thomas A. Edison

"Opportunity is missed by most of us because it is dressed in coveralls and looks like work."
— Thomas A. Edison

"Failure is really a matter of conceit. People don't work hard because, in their conceit, they imagine they'll succeed without ever making an effort. Most people believe that they'll wake up some day and find themselves rich. Actually, they've got it half right, because eventually they do wake up."
— Thomas A. Edison

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"I love Evensong. There's something sad and essentially English about it."
— Barbara Pym (Jane and Prudence)

"'Oh, this coming back to an empty house,' Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely up to her door. People - though perhaps it was only women - seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to."
— Barbara Pym (An Unsuitable Attachment)

"On the three pigs he and his wife own: "We acquired the pigs last year. My wife was born on a pig farm and has always been very fond of pigs. Of course, they are for eating, which is why they are named Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. You wouldn’t want to eat Rufus, Marcus and Esmeralda.""
— John Mortimer

"Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso."
— Philip Larkin

"To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition."
— Woody Allen

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit."
— Margaret Atwood

"Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it,
except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.
"
— Thomas à Kempis

"As long as you live, you will be subject to change, whether you will it or not - now glad, now sorrowful; now pleased, now displeased; now devout, now undevout; now vigorous, now slothful; now gloomy, now merry. But a wise man who is well taught in spiritual labor stands unshaken in all such things, and heeds little what he feels, or from what side the wind of instability blows."
— Thomas à Kempis (The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. Translated by Rev. William Benham. Published by MobileReference)

"I will try to disappoint you
better than anyone ever has."
— Stephen Dunn

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world,
which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

From Dover Beach"
— Matthew Arnold (Dover Beach and Other Poems)

"Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity."
— Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter)

"I have sometimes dreamt that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly into imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look. These need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading'."
— Virginia Woolf

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature and Selected Essays)

"Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television."
— Paul Hawken

"The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why; but they do. They are unhappy before they marry, and they imagine to themselves that the reason of their unhappiness will be removed when they are married. When it isn't they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd. I believe that is what generally starts the trouble."
— Nancy Mitford (Christmas Pudding)

"The worst of being a Communist is the parties you may go to are - well - awfully funny and touching but not very gay...I don't see the point of sad parties, do you? And Left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly."
— Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate: Two Novels)

"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"You are what you do, not what you say you'll do."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
— Carl Gustav Jung