"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead

"Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it."
— Mother Teresa

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
— Anne Frank

"I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university."
— Albert Einstein

"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

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity."
— Gilda Radner

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."
— Mitch Albom

"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

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either."
— Judy Blume

"Precious Child... nothing matters but the moment. There might be no tomorrow and even if there is, nobody gives a damn."
— Judy Blume (Summer Sisters)

""you can't deny they ever happened. You can't deny you ever loved them, love them still, even if loving them causes you pain""
— Judy Blume

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. "
— Leo Tolstoy

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them."
— Leo Tolstoy

"True life is lived when tiny changes occur."
— Leo Tolstoy

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them."
— Leo Tolstoy

"I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"…[I]f they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would just have looked into each other’s eyes, and Constantine would only have said: ‘You’re dying, dying, dying!’ – while Nicholas would simply have replied: ‘I know I’m dying, but I’m afraid, afraid, afraid!’ That’s all they would have said if they’d been talking straight from the heart. But it was impossible to live that way, so Levin tried to do what he’d been trying to do all his life without being able to, what a great many people could do so well, as he observed, and without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought, and he always felt it came out false, that his brother caught him out and was irritated by it."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"I never change, I simply become more myself."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
"
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Every scar in my face is worth it."
— Joyce Carol Oates

""See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be""
— Joyce Carol Oates (After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away)

"Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang)

"Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance."
— Joyce Carol Oates (High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006)

""Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed."
— Joyce Carol Oates (The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982)

"You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (I Am No One You Know: Stories)

"What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been. "
— Joyce Carol Oates (I Am No One You Know: Stories)

"There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Wild Nights!: New Stories)

"He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless)

"The less of routine, the more of life."
— Amos Bronson Alcott

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Dance Like No One is Watching...
Love Like You Have Never Been Hurt Before...
Go to Work Like You Don't Need The Money."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"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)

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning do to do afterward."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please-a little less love, and a little more common decency."
— Kurt Vonnegut