"I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again."
— Anais Nin From Fire: A Journal of Love

"The game is an analogy for life: there are not enough chairs or good times to go around, not enough food, not enough joy, nor beds nor jobs nor laughs nor friends nor smiles nor money nor clean air to breathe...and yet the music goes on."
— Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)

"Many couples, many people, are not living with real human beings, but with their ghosts. Who has not followed for years the spell of a particular tone of voice, from voice to voice, as the fetishist follows a beautiful foot, scarcely seeing the woman herself? A voice, a mouth, an eye, all stemming from the original fountain of our first desire, directing it, enslaving us, until we choose to unravel the fatal web and free ourselves."
— Anaïs Nin

"People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room."
— Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)

"The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did."
— Erica Jong

"Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves."
— Annie Dillard

"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

"I hate people doing an emotional striptease. It's never genuine or they wouldn't drag outsiders in."
— Evelyn Anthony

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."
— Albert Einstein

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."
— e.e. cummings

"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad."
— Salvador Dalí

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

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
— Oscar Wilde

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"To be loved for what one is, that is the
greatest exception. The great majority love in others only what they lend him;
their own selves, their version of him."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"You don't have to be afraid of looking into my face. We've done nothing to each other that time will not erase."
— Bob Dylan lyrics

"You been down to the bottom with a bad man, babe
But you're back were you belong"
— Bob Dylan

"Sex is an emotion in motion."
— Mae West

"Some people are always thirsting for water from other people's wells."
— Jessamyn West

"If I had sleep I should not know so well the poets."
— Eliza Boyle O'Reilly

"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you."
— Zora Neale Hurston

"I write emotional algebra."
— Anaïs Nin

"Isn’t it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do “practice”?"
— George Carlin

"If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little."
— George Carlin

"How many loved your moments of glad grace and loved your beauty with love false or true? But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the sorrows of your changing face. "When You Are Old And Gray""
— William Butler Yeats

"Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away."
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

"Between waking and being awake there is a moment full of doubt and dream, when you struggle to remember what the place and when the time and whether you really are."
— Keri Hulme from The Bone People

"I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.
"
— Keri Hulme (The Bone People)

"I have never felt any rest in sleep. For a few seconds I am numbed, then a new life begins, freed from the conditions of time and space, and doubtless similar to that state which awaits us after death. Who knows if there is not some link between those two existences and if it is not possible for the soul to unite them now?"
— Gerard de Nerval

"Don't wear perfume in the garden, unless you want to be pollinated by bees."
— Anne Raver

"Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish to hell he'd go away."
— Gregory Maguire

"There is no disguise which can hide love for long where it exists, or simulate it where it does not."
— La Rocherfoucauld

"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
— Victor Hugo

"It was the pure Language of the World. It required no explanation, just as the universe needs none as it travels through endless time. What the boy felt at that moment was that he was in the presence of the only woman in his life, and that, with no need for words, she recognized the same thing. He was more certain of it than of anything in the world. He had been told by his parents and grandparents that he must fall in love and really know a person before becoming committed. But maybe people who felt that way had never learned the universal language. Because, when you know that language, it's easy to understand that someone in the world awaits you, whether it's in the middle of the desert or in some great city. And when two such people encounter each other, and their eyes meet, the past and the future become unimportant. There is only that moment, and the incredible certainty that everything under the sun has been written by one hand only. It is the hand that evokes love, and creates a twin soul for every person in the world. Without such love, one's dreams would have no meaning."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not."
— Francis Bacon

"It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience."
— Imannuel Kant

"None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not."
— Benedict Spinoza

"We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin; the second is knowing when to stop."
— Paulo Coelho

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
— Franz Kafka

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

""So we call upon the author to explain
(Doop doop doop doop dooop)
Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets, we've shunned them from the greasy-grind The poor little things, they look so sad and old as they mount us from behind I ask them to desist and to refrain And then we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)Rosary clutched in his hand, he died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop)
He said everything is messed up around here, everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me in this idiot constituency of the moon
Well, he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain
(Doop doop doop doop dooop)
Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!
Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!(Doop doop doop doop dooop) Well, I go guruing down the street, young people gather round my feet Ask me things, but I don't know where to start They ignite the power-trail ssstraight to my father's heart And once again I call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...)We call upon the author to explain Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought? I feel like a vacuum cleaner, a complete sucker, it's fucked up and he is a fucker But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain
(Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Oh rampant discrimination, mass poverty, third world debt, infectious diseease
Global inequality and deepening socio-economic divisions Well, it does in your brain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window (Hey Doug, how you been?) Brings me back a book on holocaust poetry complete with pictures Then tells me to get ready for the rain And we call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) I say prolix! Prolix! Something a pair of scissors can fix
Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papier mache, went the Heming-way weirdly on wings and with maximum pain We call upon the author to explain (Doop doop doop doop dooop ...) Down in my bolthole I see they've published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish "The waves, the waves were soldiers moving". Well, thank you, thank you, thank you
And again I call upon the author to explain Yeah, we call upon the author to explain Prolix! Prolix! There's nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!"
— Nick Cave

""God cannot be referred to as 'good,' 'better,' or 'best' because He is above all things. If a man says that God is wise, the man is lying because anything that is wise can become wiser. Anything that a man might say about God is incorrect... The best a man can do is to remain silent...The true master knows that if he had a God he could understand, he would never hold Him to be God.""
— Andrew Davidson

"Whatever you put your attention on becomes energized. Whatever you take your attention away from dwindles."
— Depak Chopra

"Kids own nothing. Everything is either promised, borrowed, longed for or exaggerated. "
— Jonathan Carroll

"I started a short story but it was so dreary that even my pen threw up."
— Jonathan Carroll

"I understand that some people find God after misfortune, although this seems to me even more ridiculous than finding Him in good times. 'God smote me. He must love me.' It's like not wanting a romantic relationship until a member of the opposite sex punches you in the face. My 'miraculous survival' will not change my opinion that Heaven is an idea constructed by man to help him cope with the fact that life on earth is both brutally short, and paradoxically, far too long. "
— Andrew Davidson (The Gargoyle)

"The only way to make beauty ugly is to show it's crazy. Like twisting the top off a jar of something wonderful to eat, the moment he's hit by the terrible smell of it gone bad, even the hungriest person will drop the jar in the trash without a second thought."
— Jonathan Carroll

"Making wishes on the elephant is emotionally dangerous, because inevitably one's hopes rise abnormally high, unhealthily high, and when the wish does not come true, one's high hopes get crushed more painfully than if one had not asked for the help of supernatural powers. Therefore, one should always try to make the wish casually and forget about it instantly after making it, which is what I try to do now."
— Amanda Filipacchi (Nude Men)

"We have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity. And I am not referring to the sort of beauty that is the exclusive preserve of Art. Those who feel inspired, as I do, by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the inessential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way.
"
— Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog)

"[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. "
— Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)