"Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
— Flannery O'Connor

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway

"Do you hate people?

I don't hate them...I just feel better when they're not around."
— Charles Bukowski (The Movie: Barfly)

"there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late"
— Charles Bukowski

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
— Socrates

"Let no man pull you low enough to hate him."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist."
— Michael Levine

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
— May Sarton

"Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."
— Gustave Flaubert

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
— Arundhati Roy

"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

"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 was a pleasure to burn."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity."
— Dorothy Parker

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

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

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
— Joseph Campbell

"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"
— Stephen W. Hawking (A Brief History of Time)

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing."
— Elie Wiesel

"Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time."
— Haruki Murakami

"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)

"I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life."
— Maya Angelou

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die."
— Malachy McCourt

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
— Dylan Thomas

"Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love – for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment is it perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you from misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."
— Max Ehrmann (Desiderata: A Poem for a Way of Life)

"A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot..."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"It is hard to find a perfect fit in an off the shelf world"
— episode of M.A.S.H.

"A few said they'd be horses. Most said they'd be some sort of cat. My friend said she'd like to come back as a porcupine. I don't like crowds, she said. "
— Brian Andreas

"...I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to."
— Elizabeth Berg (Talk Before Sleep: A Novel)

"And so now I'd like to say - people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks - I am one of them. But we've all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything - this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That's because they've been dehumanised. It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain't going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you're nothing. That's my spiel."
— Joe Strummer

"I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter, scraped over too much bread.~~
Bilbo Baggins on the occasion of his 111st Birthday"
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these."
— Susan B. Anthony

"I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. "
— Lorrie Moore (Anagrams)

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
— Ray Bradbury

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury