"I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning."
— Orhan Pamuk

"Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words."

From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time. "
— Orhan Pamuk (Other Colors: Essays and a Story)

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering..."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it."
— Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1)

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures."
— Alexandre Dumas

"Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy"
— Alexandre Dumas

"For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart."
— Alexandre Dumas

"What I’ve loved most after you, is myself: that is, my dignity and that strength which made me superior to other men. That Strength was my life. You’ve broken it with a word, so I must die."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never."
— Alexandre Dumas

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Ninguna persona que merece tus lagrimas. Y quien las merezcas no te hara llorar."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"It was a love of perpetual flight."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"'You can't eat hope,' the woman said.
'You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied."
— Gabriel García Márquez (El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba)

"I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!"
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
— William Shakespeare

"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father refuse thy name, thou art thyself thou not a montegue, what is montegue? tis nor hand nor foot nor any other part belonging to a man
What is in a name?
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
So Romeo would were he not Romeo called retain such dear perfection to which he owes without that title,
Romeo, Doth thy name!
And for that name which is no part of thee, take all thyself....
- (Act II, Scene II)"
— William Shakespeare (Romeo And Juliet)

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Act 5, scene 5, 19–28 "
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Time is very slow for those who wait
Very fast for those who are scared
very long for those who lament
Very short for those who celebrate
But for those who love time is eternal"
— William Shakespeare

"Presume not that I am the thing I was."
— William Shakespeare

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

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway

"Never confuse movement with action."
— Ernest Hemingway

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
— Ernest Hemingway

"About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
— Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it."
— Ernest Hemingway

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"sometimes you don't need a goal in life, you don't need to know the big picture. you just need to know what you're going to do next!"
— Sophie Kinsella (The Undomestic Goddess)

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?"
— J.M. Coetzee (Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II)

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts."
— Elizabeth Gilbert