"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I would challenge to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!"
— William Shakespeare

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
— Albert Camus

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"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)

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

"How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?"
— William Shakespeare

"He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it"
— Joseph Heller (Catch-22)

"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"'This is a people shooting hat,' I said. 'I shoot people in this hat.'"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck."
— Joss Whedon

"Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
— Albert Camus

"“You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.” --Colonel Korn, Catch-22 "
— Joseph Heller

"Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else."
— Joseph Heller

"I would prefer not to."
— Herman Melville (Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"I've always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments."
— John Barrowman

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde

"I have nothing to declare except my genius."
— Oscar Wilde

"Everything popular is wrong."
— Oscar Wilde

"Pouring out liquor is like burning books."
— William Faulkner

"My mother is a fish."
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

"A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…."
— William Faulkner

"I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are far too complicated to have simple labels."
— Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass)

"Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women...merely adored."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

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

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
— William Shakespeare

"He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man. He that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him."
— William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing)

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare."
— William Shakespeare

"‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That’s what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche or a blow job or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have a feeling that they can’t hide."
— Rachel Cohn (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)

"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation."
— Tom Stoppard

"Mothers are all slightly insane."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"I live in New York, and I was thinking about the lagoon in Central Park, down near Central Park South. I was wondering if it would be frozen over when I got home, and if it was, where did the ducks go? I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away. -Holden Caulfield"
— J.D. Salinger

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."
— Joss Whedon

"I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. "
— Joss Whedon

"All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once...Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now."
— Joss Whedon

"I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others -- The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)