"When the day shall come that we do part," he said softly, and turned to look at me, "if my last words are not 'I love you'-ye'll ken it was because I didna have time."
— Diana Gabaldon (The Fiery Cross)

"Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return.

And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil."
— Diana Gabaldon (A Breath of Snow and Ashes)

"Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"Percy wouldn't notice a joke if it danced naked in front of him wearing one of
Dobby's hats."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"Holey? You have the the whole world of ear-related humor before you, you go for holey?"
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"I took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I had never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamberpots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon - or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything."
— Jasper Fforde

"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"If real life were a book, it would never find a publisher."
— Jasper Fforde

"After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as the do for the writer - perhaps more."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

"I'm not mad. I'm just...well, differently moralled, that's all."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth. "
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head."
— Jasper Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots)

"It's simple. If you go to see 'Saturday Night Fever' expecting it to be good, it's a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it's that, too. Thus 'Saturday Night Fever' can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation - even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology."

"I think I understand that. Does it work with any John Travolta movie?"

"Only the artistically ambiguous ones such as 'Pulp Fiction' or 'Face/Off.' 'Battlefield Earth' doesn't work, because it's a stinker no matter how much you think you're going to like it, and 'Get Shorty' doesn't work either, because you'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"How fishy on the fishiness scale? Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark."

"A whale isn't a fish, Thursday."

"A whale shark is--sort of."

"All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish."

"A crayfish isn't a fish."

"A starfish, then."

"Still not a fish."

"This is a very odd conversation, Thursday."
— Jasper Fforde (Lost in a Good Book)

"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

"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

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

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn."
— 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

"Oh, poor Watcher. Did your life pass before your eyes — 'Cuppa tea, cuppa tea... almost got shagged... cuppa tea'?
"
— Joss Whedon (The Gift: Cinemanga)

"You're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater."
— Joss Whedon

""I could NEVER be your girl."

-Buffy to Spike, Season 6, Dead Things"
— Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

"Doctor, I'm taking your sister under my protection if any thing happens to her I swear to you I will get very choked up. Honestly there might be tears."
— Joss Whedon (Firefly Official Companion, Vol. 1)

"Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn't suck."
— Joss Whedon

"You're kidding ... what a crazy random happenstance!"
— Joss Whedon

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
— Virginia Woolf

"When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”"
— Virginia Woolf

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Books are the mirrors of the soul."
— Virginia Woolf (Between the Acts)

"All extremes of feeling are allied with madness."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."
— Virginia Woolf

"But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm."
— Virginia Woolf

"First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad."
— Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim and The Rachel Papers)

""Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.""
— Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)

"Conventionality is not morality."
— Charlotte Brontë

"The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort."
— Jane Austen

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language"
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like."
— Jane Austen

"Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings."
— Jane Austen

"How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)