"Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no "moments of truth." It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which thenselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered."
— Thomas Pynchon (V.)

"He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees. "
— Thomas Pynchon (V.)

"An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of - of all things - an "idea for a story," and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard."
— Annie Dillard (Living by Fiction)

"Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future."
— Dean Koontz (The Taking)

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps up omnibuses."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"There is no good reason. Don't waste your life waiting for good reasons...You'll wait and wait."
— Susan Minot (Evening)

"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individial mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosopy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed."
— Dean Koontz (The Taking)

"In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"When reading, one needs to remember that poets and philosophers are not prescribing courses of action but exploring aspects of existence."
— Louise Cowan

"It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself."
— Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)

"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

"Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another."
— William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience)

"People change and forget to tell each other."
— Lillian Hellman (Toys in the Attic.)

"If you're lucky enough to fall in love, that's one thing. Otherwise all that was ever truly beautiful to me was boyhood. It's the meal we sup on for the rest of our lives. Love puts the icing on life. But if you don't find it...you must call on your childhood memories over and over till you do."
— Leon Uris (Trinity)

"I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh."
— Rebecca West (The Return of the Soldier)

"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden."
— Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)

"Our interpreting the univers as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial fimmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer. And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcedentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers."
— Annie Dillard (Living by Fiction)

"Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?"
— André Gide

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

"Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches. "
— David James Duncan (River Teeth)

"Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength."
— David James Duncan (The Brothers K)

"The place where...knowledge occurs is the present. That which recognizes the present is mind."
— Fred Alan Wolf (Parallel Universes)

"But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist."
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"Write it down, boy. If you come across a passage in your reading that you’d like to remember, write it down in your little book; then you can read it again, memorize it, and have it whenever you wish."
— Keith Donohue

"Once I learned to read, I could not imagine my life otherwise."
— Keith Donohue