"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. "
— Augusten Burroughs (Magical Thinking: True Stories)

"No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater...The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that's the key. It's like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot."
— Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)

"It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

"What you risk reveals what you value."
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, It’s a wonder we do it at all. And yet..

"
— Libba Bray

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. "
— C.S. Lewis

"There are some people, you know, who are too important to ever be forgotten."
— Clive Barker (Abarat)

"Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard."
— Walter Dean Myers (Slam!)

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
— Anaïs Nin

"Each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. That is why you cannot love two people the same. It simply is not possible. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out of you."
— William P. Young (The Shack)

"How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?

Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.

Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down."
— Michael Marshall Smith

""You said you didn't want to get involved with me,that one of us would get hurt and how you couldn't bear it. Well that just isn't good enough..Look what happens to people just living their lives. They get hurt, it's not fair they get hurt but they do, all the time, no matter how careful they are. Somebody can just just come along and hurt them, for no stupid reason..""
— Julian Gough (Juno & Juliet: A Novel)

"Life's short. Live passionately."
— Marc A. Pitman

"For the truth is that I already know as much about my fate as I need to know. The day will come when I will die. So the only matter of consequence before me is what I will do with my allotted time. I can remain on shore, paralyzed with fear, or I can raise my sails and dip and soar in the breeze."
— Richard Bode (First You Have to Row a Little Boat: Reflections on Life & Living)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there’s no need at all to understand what’s happening, because everything happens within you."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"Fire Against Fire (from The People Who Didn't Say Goodbye)

I move impatiently
towards a lover
I haven't met"
— Merrit Malloy

"It's better to break one's heart than to do nothing with it."
— Margaret Kennedy

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"There we will, I pray, remain and learn and grow until the time when we will rise together to the ultimate heights, changing in appearance but never in devotion, sharing the transcendent glory of our love through all eternity."
— Richard Matheson (What Dreams May Come)

"You can't force love, I realized. It's there or it isn't. If it's not there, you've got to be able to admit it. If it is there, you've got to do whatever it takes to protect the ones you love."
— Richelle Mead (Frostbite (Vampire Academy, #2))

"I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome.
"Okay," he said. He took a breath. "What would you do, if you could do anything?"
I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. "This," I said. And then I kissed him."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"When it comes to men who are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do."
— Randy Pausch

"The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

""I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally.""
— Zelda Fitzgerald

"Never close your lips to those who have opened your heart."
— Charles Dickens

"They do not love that do not show their love. the course of true love never did run smooth. Love is a familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love."
— William Shakespeare

""Before I sleep and after I wake up and all the hours in between ... you occupy my mind. So, practically every moment of the day you are in my thoughts. I miss you.""
— Unknown Person

"Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
"
— Louise Erdrich

""some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.""
— Louise Erdrich (Tales of Burning Love: A Novel)

"Some people say that love is just a myth...but it isn't. It's real. VERY REAL. If it wasn't, then what the hell would you be living for? You have to believe in love and fairy tales and prince charmings. You have to believe in what is real. You have to believe in what God himself created. "
— Jackie Stacy

"I ought not to doubt the steadiness of your affection. Yet such is the inconsistency of real love, that it is always awake to suspicion, however unreasonable; always requiring new assurances from the object of its interest, and thus it is, that i always feel revived, as by a new convinction, when your words tell me I am dear to you; and wanting these, I relapse into doubt and often into despondency."
— Ann Radcliffe

"It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find."
— Gustave Flaubert (Sentimental Education)

"I'm here . . . which roughly translated means I would rather die than stay away from you. I'm an idiot."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."
— Helen Keller

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)