"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle"
— Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face."
— Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring)

"Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort."
— Jane Austen

"Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!"
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings."
— Jane Austen

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn."
— John Muir

"He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"If we are all alive ten years hence, let's meet, and see how many of us have got our wishes, or how much nearer we are then than now."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"Watch and pray, dear, never get tired of trying, and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be."
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"do you really think he likes me lizzi?"
"jane, he danced with you most of the night and stared at you the rest of it."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others...Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever."
— Irène Némirovsky (Suite Française)

""Adieu," he said, "this is goodbye. I'll never forget you, never."
She stood silent. He looked at her and saw her eyes full of tears. He turned away.
At this moment she wasn't ashamed of loving him, because her physical desire had gone and all she felt towards him now was pity and a profound, almost maternal tenderness. She forced herself to smile. "Like the Chinese mother who sent her son off to war telling him to be careful 'because war has its dangers,' I'm asking you, if you have any feelings for me, to be as careful as possible with your life."
"Because it is precious to you?" he asked nervously.
"Yes. Because it is precious to me.""
— Irène Némirovsky (Suite Française)

"Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting."
— William Makepeace Thackeray

"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
— Emily Dickinson

"Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all."
— Helen Keller

"Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!"
— Emily Brontë

"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
— Victor Hugo

"It is not the length of life, but the depth."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. "
— W. Somerset Maugham

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you."
— Jane Austen (Persuasion)

"Perhaps it it our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another!"
— Jane Austen (Emma)

"To deny that there was this dark side of life would be like pretending that the cold of winter was somehow only a temporary illusion, a way station on the way to the higher "reality" of long, warm, pleasant summers. But summer, it turned out, was no more real than the snow that melted in wintertime."
— David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars)

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)