"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"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

"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning."
— Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions)

""Why is it the songs all end with the good people winning, but in life they don't?"
"They don't make songs when the good lose," I muttered. "They make war chants against the bad. So there won't be any songs for us." "
— Sherwood Smith (Crown Duel)

"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake."
— E.M. Forster

"He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace."
— Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes)

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

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"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)

"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)

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot"
— Jane Austen (Persuasion)

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

"I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligable"
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"And pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked."
— Jane Austen

"'My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.' 'You are mistaken,' he said gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.' "
— Jane Austen

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. "
— Salman Rushdie

"We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"That best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love."
— William Wordsworth

"There is a comfort in the strenght of love; 'Twill make a thing endurable, which else would overset the brain, or break the heart."
— William Wordsworth

"Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man."
— William Wordsworth

"War is what happens when language fails."
— Margaret Atwood

"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."
— Margaret Atwood

"If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Two Towers)

"The consolation of fairy stories, the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly, the good catastrophe, the sudden, joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to a fairy tale); this joy, which is one of the things that fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially escapist or fugitive. In it's fairy tale or other world setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace, never to be counted on to reoccur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, or sorrow and failure, the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance. It denies, (in the face of much evidence if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be. "
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product."
— -Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and author (1884-1962)

"There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
— John Keats

"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination."
— John Keats

"O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!"
— John Keats (Letters of John Keats)

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
— John Keats

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will."
— Charlotte Brontë

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs"
— Charlotte Brontë