"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)

"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so."
— Elizabeth Bishop (Poems, Prose and Letters)

"Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. "
— Pablo Neruda

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
— Franz Kafka

"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
— Franz Kafka

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I would prefer not to."
— Herman Melville (Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street)

"A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for."
— Herman Melville

"Some day I'm gonna call me up on the phone, so when I answer, I can tell myself to shut up."
— Miles Davis

"If you understood everything I said, you’d be me"
— Miles Davis

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus