"The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable."
— Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

"To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell. "
— Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
— Oscar Wilde

"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
— Oscar Wilde

"The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for."
— Oscar Wilde

"Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times."
— Aeschylus

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"This is your life and its ending one moment at a time."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"We'll never be as young as we are tonight."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"What we don't understand we can make mean anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized yet."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Stultum est timere quod vitare non potes. It is foolish to fear what you cannot avoid."
— Publius Syrus

"In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
— George Orwell

"The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
— George Orwell

"The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be."
— Socrates

"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

"Looked into the sky, heavy with smoke and human fat, and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. It is not God that kills the children, not fate the butchers them, nor destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal."
— Richard Russo

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
— Cormac McCarthy

"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstitiion will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

That would be a hell of a zoo.

The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so."
— Cormac McCarthy

"The point is there ain't no point."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?"
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me – my neck, say, or my knee – and I’d carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched."
— Jamie O'Neill

"Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"A story is a letter than the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Shall I project a world? "
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community."
— Susan Sontag (At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches)

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats."
— Lemony Snicket (The Wide Window)

"It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk."
— Lemony Snicket

"A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead."
— Lemony Snicket (The Slippery Slope)

"Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make -- bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake -- if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see at once how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it had floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you'd made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning."
— Lemony Snicket (The Austere Academy)

"The world is quiet here."
— Lemony Snicket