""...in certain times of stress and dire circumstance profanity provides a relief denied even unto prayer.""
— Mark Twain

"Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
— Jim Henson

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone."
— Bill Cosby

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

"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)

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."
— Lemony Snicket

"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)

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
— Mark Twain

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898"
— Mark Twain

"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."
— Mark Twain

"Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"each man's hell is in a different
place: mine is just up and
behind
my ruined
face."
— Charles Bukowski

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"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)

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame."
— Stephen King

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice."
— Charles Bukowski (Women)

"Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them."
— Albert Camus

"Words do not express thoughts very well; every thing immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another."
— Siddhartha Gautama

"If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down."
— Ray Bradbury

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."
— Albert Camus

"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
— Albert Camus

"When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune."
— Albert Camus

"I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God."
— Albert Camus (L'etranger)

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"You live and learn. At any rate, you live."
— Douglas Adams

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)