"The stains could be seen only in the sunlight, so Ruth was never really aware of them until later, when she would stop at n outdoor cafe for a cup of coffee, and look down at her skirt and see the dark traces of spilled vodka or whiskey. The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: "booze affects material as it does people.""
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be."
— Shel Silverstein

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
— Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee."
— Abraham Lincoln

"There are never enough 'I love you's.'"
— Lenny Bruce

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
— Winston S. Churchill

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"I dreamed I spoke in another's language,
I dreamed I lived in another's skin,
I dreamed I was my own beloved,
I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.

I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,
And when I breathed a garden came,
I dreamed I knew all of Creation,
I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.

I dreamed--and this dream was the finest--
That all I dreamed was real and true,
And we would live in joy forever,
You in me, and me in you."
— Clive Barker (Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War)

"Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions."
— Aldous Huxley

"Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'"
— Billy Collins

"The sad truth is the truth is sad."
— Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital)

"We'll never be as young as we are tonight."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"When some is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
— Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works)

"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds."
— Douglas Adams

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
— Malcolm X

"Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. "
— Oscar Wilde

"There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth."
— Maya Angelou

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST."
— Frank Zappa

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
— Albert Einstein

"Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read."
— Frank Zappa (The Real Frank Zappa Book)

"A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence."
— Leopold Stokowski

"I wanted to live, but whether I would or not was mystery, and in the midst of confronting that fact, even at that moment, I was beginning to sense that to stare into the heart of such a fearful mystery wasn't a bad thing. To be afraid is a priceless education. P 99"
— Lance Armstrong (It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life)

"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
"
— Robert Frost

"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."
— John Cage

"I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together"
— Billy Collins

"Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I'm told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but its silver when its wet, and all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet."
— Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Nobody loves me, nobody cares,
Nobody picks me peaches and pears.
Nobody offers me candy and Cokes,
Nobody listens and laughs at me jokes.
Nobody helps when I get into a fight,
Nobody does all my homework at night.
Nobody misses me,
Nobody cries,
Nobody thinks I'm a wonderful guy.
So, if you ask me who's my best friend, in a whiz,
I'll stand up and tell you NOBODY is!
But yesterday night I got quite a scare
I woke up and Nobody just WASN'T there!
I called out and reached for Nobody's hand,
In the darkness where Nobody usually stands,
Then I poked through the house, in each cranny and nook,
But I found SOMEBODY each place that I looked.
I seached till I'm tired, and now with the dawn,
There's no doubt about it-
NOBODY'S GONE!!"
— Shel Silverstein

"Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use."
— Mark Twain

"I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins. "
— Shel Silverstein

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
— Mark Twain

"If you have to dry the dishes
(Such an awful boring chore)
If you have to dry the dishes
('Stead of going to the store)
If you have to dry the dishes
And you drop one on the floor
Maybe they won't let you
Dry the dishes anymore
"
— Shel Silverstein (A Light in the Attic)

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— Oscar Wilde

"True story
This morning I jumped on my horse
And went for a ride,
And some wild outlaws chased me
And shot me in the side.
So I crawled into a wildcats cave
To find a place to hide
But some pirates found me sleeping there
And soon they had me tied
To a pole and built a fire
Under me---I almost cried
Till a mermaid came and cut me loose
And begged to be my bride
So I said id come back Wednesday
But I must admit I lied.
Then I ran into a jungle swamp
But I forgot my guide
And I stepped into some quicksand
And no matter how hard I tried
I couldn’t get out, until I met
A watersnake named Clyde
Who pulled me to some cannibals
Who planned to have me fried
But an eagle came and swooped me up
And through the air we flied
But he dropped me in a boiling lake
A thousand miles wide
And you’ll never guess what I did then---
I DIED"
— Shel Silverstein

"Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."
— Lemony Snicket

"After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them."
— Oscar Wilde

"Good sex is like good bridge. If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand."
— Mae West

"Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves."
— Albert Einstein

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
— Abraham Lincoln

"My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.


"
— Abraham Lincoln

"My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)