"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned."
— James Joyce

"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)

"And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart? "
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
— Anaïs Nin

"It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
— Albert Camus

"I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living."
— Anaïs Nin

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Above all, life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference"
— Robert Frank

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up."
— Franz Kafka

"I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ"
— Anaïs Nin

"You're wishin' too much baby. You gotta' stop wearin' your wishbone where your backbone oughta be!"
— Richard from Texas-- Eat, Pray, Love

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
— Henry David Thoreau

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us."
— Henry David Thoreau

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Other Writings)

"There is no remedy for love, but to love more."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake."
— Henry David Thoreau

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."
— Henry David Thoreau

"The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes."
— Henry David Thoreau

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."
— Albert Camus

"The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way. "
— Diane Arbus (Diane Arbus Revelations)

""A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know." "
— Diane Arbus

"I don't just look at the thing itself or at the reality itself; I look around the edges for those little askew moments-kind of like what makes up our lives-those slightly awkward, lovely moments."
— Keith Carter

"To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy."
— Henri Cartier-Bresson (The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers)

"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."
— Franz Kafka

"Books are a narcotic."
— Franz Kafka

"I am free and that is why I am lost."
— Franz Kafka

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
— Anaïs Nin

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— Anaïs Nin

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
— Anaïs Nin

"From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life."
— Anaïs Nin

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
— Anaïs Nin

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
— Anaïs Nin

"Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves"
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
— Anaïs Nin

"if what proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then i will never know happiness. for i am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
— Anaïs Nin

"I am exhausted by trying to get along with the Lord."
— Louise Rennison (Away Laughing on a Fast Camel: Even More Confessions of Georgia Nicolson)

"Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. "
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

"I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room."
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

"Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.

Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem"
— Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)