"A house without books is like a room without windows."
— Horace Mann

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"We don't need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."
— Philip Pullman

"Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."
— Arnold Lobel

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."
— Saul Bellow

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
— Anaïs Nin

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

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

"The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)

"Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul"
— Victor Hugo

"All you need is love."
— John Lennon

"One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving."
— Paulo Coelho

"Who, being loved, is poor?"
— Oscar Wilde

"Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Lathe of Heaven)

"It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. "
— Plato

"Love is being honest with yourself at all times
being honest with the other person at all times
telling, listening, respecting the truth
and never pretending
Love is the source of reality"
— Susan Polis Schutz

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
— Robert Frost

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"Te amo como se aman ciertas cosa oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.
(I love you as certain darks things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)"
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life."
— John Lennon

"I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."
— C.S. Lewis (The Silver Chair)

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles. "
— Willa Cather

"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get - only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything"
— Katharine Hepburn (Me : Stories of My Life)

"The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"After a battle lasting many ages,
The Devil won,
And said to God
(who had been his Maker):
'Lord,
We are about to witness the unmaking of Creation
By my hand.
I would not wish you
to think me cruel,
So I beg you, take three things
From this world before I destroy it.
Three things, and then the rest will be
wiped away.'

God thought for a little time.
And at last He said:
'No, there is nothing.'
The Devil was surprised.
'Not even you, Lord?' he said.
And God said:
'No. Not even me.'"
— Clive Barker (Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War)

"When you love someone you let them take care of you."
— Jodi Picoult

"So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"I have been astonished that men coould die martyrs
for their religion--
I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.
I could be martyred for my religion.
Love is my religion
and I could die for that.
I could die for you."
— John Keats

"Drualt took Freya's warm hand,
Her strong hand,
Her sword hand,
And pressed it to his lips,
Pressed it to his heart.
'Come with me,' he said.
'Come with me to battle,
My love. Tarry at my side.
Stay with me
When battle is done.
Tarry at my side.
Laugh with me,
And walk with me
The long, long way.
Tarry with me,
My love, at my side.'"
— Gail Carson Levine (The Two Princesses of Bamarre)

"Kisses open doors, I've noticed. That one gesture can unlock secrets, ease open feelings. It can't be prevented--these kisses just are. It's how they work. They break into basements you never knew you had."
— Susan Fletcher (Eve Green: A Novel)

"Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion."
— Dylan Thomas

"talking about love is like dancing about architecture"
— From the movie "Playing by Heart" (1998)

"Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"You are my sweetest downfall. I loved you first, I loved you first."
— Regina Spektor

"Life is short and we never have enough time for the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind."
— Henri Frédéric Amiel (Amiel's Journal)

"I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

"They say happiness and true love can only be found in Fairy Tales, isn't it time to make your own"
— Jamee

"When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. "
— (From the Movie When Harry Met Sally)

"Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?"
— Stephen King

"I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
— Neil Gaiman (American Gods)