"I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

""The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively""
— Bob Marley

"Be steady and well-ordered in your life so that you can be fierce and original in your work."
— Gustave Flaubert

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"
— Gustave Flaubert

"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."
— Gustave Flaubert

"At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
— Arundhati Roy

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too."
— Stephen King (It)

"All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Bluebeard)

"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but 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."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Two Towers)

"When the rich wage war it's the poor who die."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
— Ernest Hemingway

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."
— Neil Gaiman

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."
— Thomas Jefferson

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
— James A. Michener

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
— Neil Gaiman

"The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
— Albert Camus

"May you live every day of your life."
— Jonathan Swift

"If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet."
— Keith Richards (Keith Richards: In His Own Words)

"Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"Sameron adion aso
'I shall sing a sweeter song tomorrow'"
— Theocritus

"I don't like my language watered down, I don't like my edges rounded off."
— Ani DiFranco

"Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows."
— Marion C. Garretty

"Sometimes i'd stand by the royal walls.
The sky would be so big that it broke my soul."
— Regina Spektor

"When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free."
— Rob Sheffield

"A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place."
— Kevin Brockmeier

"I've always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments."
— John Barrowman

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone"
— Pablo Picasso

"...for now he was in one of those crises when the soul yields a blurred glimpse of all that it enfolds, like an ocean, tempest-torn, uncovering everything from the seaweed in the shallows to the sands of the abyss."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?"
— John Steinbeck (Sweet Thursday)

"After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do."
— John Steinbeck (The Pastures of Heaven)

"A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"A man without words is a man without thought."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"He never fell,
never slipped back,
never flew."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)