"He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family."
— Stephen King (The Green Mile)

"Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman's got to hold on to."
— Stephen King (Dolores Claiborne)

"Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation."
— Stephen King (The Green Mile)

"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we're mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations.

And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark."
— Stephen King (Duma Key)

"... you will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God’s help you will stand."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back."
— Eugene O'Neill

"And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver."
— Stephen King (Lisey's Story)

"...if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty."
— Stephen King (Duma Key)

"...the only mortal sin is giving up."
— Stephen King

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?"
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"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)

"...[T]he terrible tyranny of the majority."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"He was right. And he was an insensitive shit."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch."
— Jodi Picoult

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

""You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?" "
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"It's disappointing to know that someone can see right through you."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up"
— Jodi Picoult

"You can't edit a blank page"
— Jodi Picoult

"Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"(But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant ...)"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."
— Anonymous (The Bhagavad Gita)

"Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it's what you want before you commit."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the 'monkey mind' -- the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids."
— Stephen King