"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way to make life more bearable."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"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

"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"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)

"...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing."
— Markus Zusak

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on..."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"After perhaps thirty meters, just as a soldier turned around, the girl was felled. Hands were clamped upon her from behind and the boy next door brought her down. He forced her knees to the road and suffered the penalty. He collected her punches as if they were presents. Her bony hands and elbows were accepted with nothing but a few short moans. He accumulated the loud, clumsy specks of saliva and tears as if they were lovely to his face, and more important, he was able to hold her down."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"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

"Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

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

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

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

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with. "
— --Wayne W. Dyer

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me."
— John Knowles (A Separate Peace)

"Certain things, they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

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

"Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever."
— John Knowles (A Separate Peace)

""Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."
~Mr. Antolini"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"'That proves you are unusual,' returned the Scarecrow; 'and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.'"
— L. Frank Baum (The Land of Oz)

"Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence."
— John Knowles (A Separate Peace)

"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb...," He murmured.
"What a stupid lamb, " I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion."
— Stephenie Meyer

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"And there you see the distinction between our feelings: had he been in my place and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drank his blood! But, til then--if you don't believe me, you don't know me--till then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair of his head."
— Emily Brontë

"It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it."
— Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends & Influence People)

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
— Elbert Hubbard

"I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches and every word he says. I love all his looks, and all his actions and him entirely and all together."
— Emily Brontë

"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)

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position."
— Leo Buscaglia

"I promise to love you forever—every single day of forever."
— Stephenie Meyer (Breaking Dawn)

"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)