"We know what we are, but not what we may be."
— William Shakespeare

"We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality"
— T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets)

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
— C.S. Lewis

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."
— C.S. Lewis

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."
— C.S. Lewis

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."
— William Faulkner

"My mother is a fish."
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselssly into the past."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the 'creative temperament'-it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
— William Shakespeare

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Brevity is the Soul of wit."
— William Shakespeare

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves."
— Anonymous (Holy Bible: The King James Bible)

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost."
— G.K. Chesterton

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."
— G.K. Chesterton

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
— G.K. Chesterton

"No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete."
— G.K. Chesterton

"A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep."
— W.H. Auden

"There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again."
— W.H. Auden

"Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
— W.H. Auden


"
— Auden

"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
— Toni Morrison

"There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"Love is never any better than the lover. "
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all"
— Toni Morrison, Beloved

"Lonely was much better than alone"
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
— Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis)

"All language is but a poor translation."
— Franz Kafka

"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"I am other I now."
— James Joyce

""races condemned to 100 years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.""
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it"
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelia Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
— Gabriel García Márquez

""Puedes ser una persona para el mundo, pero para una persona tu eres el mundo"."
— Grabriel Garcia Marquez

"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
— Victor Borge

"Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will---
V.ii.10"
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"What is hell? I still maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"The formula ‘two and two make five’ is not without its attractions."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Without God all things are permitted."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky