"I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently."
— Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow)

"How can one person be more real than any other? Well, some people do hide and others seek. Maybe those who are in hiding - escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the pan pipe hootchy-kootch of experience - maybe those people, people who won't talk to rednecks, or if they're rednecks won't talk to intellectuals, people who're afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to eat what they crave, afraid to drink Mexican water, afraid to bet a long shot to win, afraid to hitchhike, jaywalk, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it, or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic, and maybe the jacklet humanist who says differently is due to have his tongue fried on the hot slabs of Liar's Hell. Some folks hide, and some folk's seek, and seeking, when it's mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous can be a form of hiding. But there are folks who want to know and aren't afraid to look and won't turn tail should they find it - and if they never do, they'll have a good time anyway because nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of one honest breath of Earth's sweet gas."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."
— Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

"I believe in the goodness of imagination."
— Sue Monk Kidd

"What a blessing it is to love books as I love them, to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal."
— Thomas Babington Macaulay

"You can't lie to your soul."
— Irvine Welsh (Porno)

"You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?"
— Jon McGregor (If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things)

"The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when his children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne's are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God."
— Mary Doria Russell (The Sparrow)

"It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself"
— Nick Hornby (Songbook)

"Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good."
— Nick Hornby (Songbook)

"The Marquis De Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences. Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"It doesn't matter how sensitive you are or how damn smart and educated you are, if you're not both at the same time, if your heart and your brain aren't connected, aren't working together harmoniously, well, you're just hopping through life on one leg. You may think you're walking, you may think you're running a damn marathon, but you're only on a hop trip. The connections gotta be maintained."
— Tom Robbins (Villa Incognito)

"Every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation."
— Tom Robbins (Villa Incognito)

"Imagination. Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. Human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever. As a species we're doomed by hope, then? You could call it hope. That, or desperation. But we're doomed without hope, as well."
— Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake)

"One sure window into a person's soul is his/her reading list."
— Mary B.W. Tabor

"We are made whole
By books, as by great spaces and the stars"
— Mary Carolyn Davies

"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool."
— Lester Bangs

"A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories)

"If you don't annoy your big sister for no good reason from time to time, she thinks you don't love her anymore."
— Pearl Cleage (What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day)

"And we danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and kissed too sweet, and threw back our heads and howled just as loud as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight."
— Pearl Cleage (What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day)

"Baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure and precious as diamonds. If only life were so simple. Within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open. That's why they say, "the game is never over until the last man is out." Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game."
— W.P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe)

"Because secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox, because one's past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way - not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I've-seen/lessons-I've-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has no personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"I always think incipent miracles surround us, waiting only to see if our faith is strong enough. We won't have to understand it; it will just work, like a beating heart, like love. Really, no matter how frightened and discouraged I may become about the future, I look forward to it. In spite of everything I see all around me every day, I have a shaky assurance that everything will turn out fine. I don't think I'm the only one. Why else would the phrase "everything's all right" ease a deep and troubled place in so many of us? We just don't know, we never know so much, yet we have such faith. We hold our hands over our hurts and lean forward, full of yearning and forgiveness. It is how we keep on, this kind of hope."
— Elizabeth Berg (Talk Before Sleep: A Novel)

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so - this has always been my dream - so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make shoes shile the children sleep."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!"
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe - what other choice was there? We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself...believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing."
— Lance Armstrong (It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life)

"You've got to love the life you live, and live the life you love."
— Jerry Garcia Band

"Because your heart accelerates with the thrumming of the tympani and the brassy blast of the horn section; it keeps tempo, marks time, this junior-sized metronome in your chest, and your entire body pulsates with the rhythm of the music; you can't help but be carried away by it as you listen and take it all in. You are mesmerized, you are utterly fascinated."
— John Rowell (The Music of Your Life: Stories)

"You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (El Principito / The Little Prince)

"He believed that life, true life, was something that was stored in music. True life was kept safe in the lines of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin while you went out in the world and met the obligations required of you. Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn't for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something. The records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another."
— Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)

"There was such an incredible logic to kissing, such a metal-to-magnet pull between two people that it was a wonder that they found the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second. Rightfully, the world should be a whirlpool of kissing into which we sank and never found the strength to rise up again."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman's rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure."
— Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)

"Give me an honest con man any day."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"We are born, we live and we die - in the midst of the marvelous."
— Sandra Gulland (The Last Great Dance on Earth)

"We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path."
— Paulo Coelho

"Songs are as sad as the listener."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of the writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one."
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

"But quilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you."
— J.D. Salinger (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction)

"And both of them are crying then, caught again in the surprise of their grief. After a year of mourning, they know they will not die of it, but neither expects it to go away. Maybe neither of them would want it to go, because then what would be left?"
— Sandra Scofield (Plain Seeing: A Novel)

"Character is too deep to catch in a single storyline. What really moves us - what makes the great stories, and there aren't so many of them - is the inevitability of character. The destiny. All we see is the arc. We'll never penetrate the secrets of the living, let alone the dead. I've spent my whole life trying to understand people, and all I've learned is that the deeper we look, the greater the mystery. At the core, each person is unknowable. Maybe that's the soul? I have to respect that. The mystery, in fact, is what I've loved the most, in people and in stories as well."
— Sandra Scofield (Plain Seeing: A Novel)

"A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness."
— Anne Fadiman (Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love)

"When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book."
— Christopher Morley

"The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)