"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"I don't want to die without any scars."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"This is your life and its ending one moment at a time."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?"
— Chuck Palahniuk

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Give all to love."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"That night in the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling the we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to hill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
— Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms)

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."
— William Shakespeare

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.
- (Act III, Scene I)"
— William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)

"Time is very slow for those who wait
Very fast for those who are scared
very long for those who lament
Very short for those who celebrate
But for those who love time is eternal"
— William Shakespeare

"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."
— William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)

"A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow."
— William Shakespeare

"Be great in act, as you have been in thought. "
— William Shakespeare

"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)

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted."
— Sylvia Plath

"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
"
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"How we need another soul to cling to."
— Sylvia Plath

"Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

""My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style" "
— Maya Angelou

"There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life."
— John Lennon

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all."
— Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
— Milan Kundera

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”"
— Milan Kundera

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
— Milan Kundera

""He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

""Happiness is the longing for repetition." "
— Milan Kundera