"There are teachers and students with square minds who are by nature meant to undergo the fascination of catagories. For them, 'schools' and 'movements' are everything; by painting a group symbol on the brow of mediocrity, they condone their own incomprehension of true genius."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past."
— Nabokov Vladimir. (Lolita. Mashenka. Zaschita Luzhina.)

"The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
— Virginia Woolf

"you dont need a weather man to know which way the wind blows"
— Bob Dylan

"To live outside the law you must be honest."
— Bob Dylan

"When you feel in your gut what you are and then dynamically pursue it - don't back down and don't give up - then you're going to mystify a lot of folks."
— Bob Dylan

"I'm against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay."
— Bob Dylan

"Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?"
— Bob Dylan (Lyrics: 1962-2001)

"The truth was obscure,
Too profound and too pure,
To live it you had to explode"
— Bob Dylan

"Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow."
— Bob Dylan

"People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent."
— Bob Dylan

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
— Jack Kerouac

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
— Jack Kerouac

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream"
— Jack Kerouac

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"If critics say your work stinks it's because they want it to stink and they can make it stink by scaring you into conformity with their comfortable little standards. Standards so low that they can no longer be considered "dangerous" but set in place in their compartmental understandings."
— Jack Kerouac

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"beautiful insane
in the rain"
— Jack Kerouac (The Subterraneans)

"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??"
— Jack Kerouac

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real. "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you.

The Shared Patio"
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Live the dream, Potato."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You)

"But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

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

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"As a woman, I have no country. As a woman my country is the world. "
— Virginia Woolf

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people"
— Virginia Woolf

"Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"All extremes of feeling are allied with madness."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"i can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. it expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. "
— Virginia Woolf

"Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read."
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts)

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions..."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin)

"Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"you have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs--the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate--the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul. "
— Nabokov Vladimir. (Lolita. Mashenka. Zaschita Luzhina.)

"Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit."
— Vladimir Nabokov