"Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. "
— Margaret Mitchell

"Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead."
— Louisa May Alcott

"What does that mean know me, know me, nobody ever knows anybody else, ever! You will never know me. "
— Bret Easton Ellis (The Rules of Attraction)

"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother. "We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"Marilla, isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet? (Anne Shirley)"
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
— George Eliot

"It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them."
— George Eliot

"Midori: So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off?

M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"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

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"Laurie, you're an angel! How shall I ever thank you?"
"Fly at me again. I rather liked it," said Laurie, looking
mischievous, a thing he had not done for a fortnight."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"He was the first, the only love her life, and in a nature like hers such passions take deep root and die-hard."
— Louisa May Alcott (A Long Fatal Love Chase)

"It has made me better loving you...it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story."
— Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady)

"You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you're doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you're lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you're really lucky."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselssly into the past."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
— Mark Twain

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898"
— Mark Twain

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
— William Butler Yeats

"If you're trying to be miserable, it's important you don't have any goals. No school goals, personal goals, family goals. Your only objective each day should be to inhale and exhale for sixteen hours before you go to bed again. Don't read anything informative, don't listen to anything useful, don't do anything productive. If you start achieving goals, you might start to feel a sense of excitement, then you might want to set another goal, and then your miserable mornings are through. To maintain your misery, the idea of crossing off your goals should never cross your mind."
— John Bytheway (How to Be Totally Miserable: A Self-Hinder Book)

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
— C.S. Lewis (Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?"
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony."
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely."
— Charlotte Brontë

"I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn."
— Paulo Coelho

"Then for all time they will say our love brought down a kingdom. Remember us."
— Tristan

"There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"We loved with a love that was more than love."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."
— Philip K. Dick

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible. "
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad."
— J.D. Salinger

"I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart."
— Richard Yates

"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

"Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

Was Rorschach.

Does that answer your Questions, Doctor?"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day."
— Alan Moore (Batman: The Killing Joke)

"Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?"
— William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)

"...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there."
— Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)

"He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream, too."
— Lewis Carroll

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?
— The Mad Hatter"
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Yes, that's it! Said the Hatter with a sigh, it's always tea time."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"I forgive nothing. If you stole my orange crayon in the fifth grade, you're still on my hit list, buddy."
— Jonathan Carroll (Bones of the Moon)