"I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"The candle aimed its spark of light at heaven, like an artist who consumes himself to become divine."
— John Steinbeck (Tortilla Flat)

"Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs maybe graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. Two inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point anything can happen."
— John Steinbeck (Tortilla Flat)

"[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."
— John Steinbeck (Cannery Row)

"Should I just sit down, right here at carousel seven, and shake until somebody's arms are around me and they're saying, 'It's okay, I'm here, I'm here, come with me to the institute.'"
— Augusten Burroughs (Dry: A Memoir)

"They're so cold, these scholars!
May lightning strike their food
so that their mouths learn how
to eat fire!"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I don't want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning."
— Orhan Pamuk (My Name Is Red)

"Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief."
— Orhan Pamuk (My Name Is Red)

"I seek no mercy; my conscience is clear."
— Alojzije Stepinac

"Art needs an operation"
— Tristan Tzara (Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries)

"The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths."
— Tristan Tzara (Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries)

"To judge from the entrance the dawn was making, it promised to be a very iffy day -- that is, blasts of angry sunlight one minute, fits of freezing rain the next, all of it seasoned with sudden gusts of wind -- one of those days when someone who is sensitive to abrupt shifts in weather and suffers them in his blood and brain is likely to change opinion and direction continuously, like those sheets of tin, cut in the shape of banners and roosters, that spin every which way on rooftops with each new puff of wind. "
— Andrea Camilleri (The Terra-Cotta Dog)

"Montalbano felt moved. This was real friendship, Sicilian friendship, the kind based on intuition, on what was left unsaid. With a true friend, one never needs to ask, because the other understands on his own accordingly."
— Andrea Camilleri (The Snack Thief)

"Montalbano and Valente seemed not to have heard him, looking as if their minds were elsewhere. But in fact they were paying very close attention, like cats that, keeping their eyes closed as if asleep, are actually counting the stars. "
— Andrea Camilleri (The Snack Thief)

"From the pit of his stomach a violent spasm of nausea rose up and seized his throat. He ran to the bathroom, barely able to stand, knelt down in front of the toilet and started to vomit. He vomited the whiskey he'd just drunk, vomited what he'd eaten that day as well as what he'd eaten the day before, and the day before that, and he felt, with his sweaty head now entirely inside the toilet bowl and a sharp pain in his side, as if he were endlessly vomiting up the entire time of his life on earth, going all the way back to the pap he was given as a baby, and when, at last, he'd expelled his own mother's milk, he kept vomiting poison bitterness, bile, pure hatred."
— Andrea Camilleri (Excursion to Tindari: An Inspector Montalbano Mystery)

"He was convinced he would keep his word. Not because he feared for his health, but because one cannot break a promise made to one's guardian angel. And he resumed the climb."
— Andrea Camilleri (Rounding the Mark)

"If I fall down, it's to the top of a mountain."
— Emrah Emir

"...[A]nd everything would be different, different."
— Ismail Kadare (Broken April)

"It was only a phrase that went from mouth to mouth and was never quite swallowed."
— Ismail Kadare (Broken April)

"Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue."
— Ismail Kadare (Broken April)

"To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity."
— Ismail Kadare (Broken April)

"His suspicion that he was not going in the right direction tortmented him more and more. At last he had the conviction that he would never go anywhere but in the wrong direction, to the very end of the handful of days that was left to him, unhappy moonstruck pilgrim, whose April was to be cut off short."
— Ismail Kadare (Broken April)

"Living is a horizontal fall."
— Jean Cocteau (Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure)

"In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness."
— Jean Cocteau (Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure)

"Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes."
— Jean Cocteau (Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure)

"Lack of manners is the sign of a hero."
— Jean Cocteau (Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure)

"Can one move an empire as if it were a house?"
— Ismail Kadare (Elegy for Kosovo: Stories)

"'This is how things come to pass in the world,' one of the princes is supposed to have said. 'Blood flows one way in life and another way in song, and one never knows which flow is the right one.'"
— Ismail Kadare (Elegy for Kosovo: Stories)

"Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behing-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance."
— Umberto Eco (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)

"And yet, he had this: the ability to make you believe in him and want to fight for him because, without any reservation, he believed in you in a way you did not yet believe in yourself. "
— John Edwards (Four Trials)

"It's so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in his cap."
— Agatha Christie (Murder at the Vicarage)

"At my time of life, one knows that the worst is usually true."
— Agatha Christie (Murder at the Vicarage)

"Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man."
— Thomas Paine (The Crisis)

"How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity."
— Donna Leon (Dressed for Death)

"Vianello had the knack of getting people to talk. Especially if they were Venetians, the people he interviewed invariably warmed to this large, sweet-tempered man who gave every appearance of speaking Italian reluctantly, who was only too glad to lapse into their common dialect, a linguistic change that often carried its speakers along to unconscious revelation. "
— Donna Leon (Death and Judgment)

"Though he did not believe, he was not untouched by the magic of belief ..."
— Donna Leon (Death and Judgment)

"...they were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing."
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter's evening. I remember them."
— Neil Gaiman (Coraline)

"Listen, old goat, today doesn't matter and tomorrow doesn't matter. It's the end of the game that counts and how many chips you've got in your pocket -- if you're still playing. "
— Robert Capa

". . . I had found the edge. The place where you unstrap all your fastenings to the earth, to what you are what you have been, where you flame out on the edge of the spheres, and the sun and moon become eclipsed and the world below is as dead and remote and without interest as if it were glazed with ice. "
— James Lee Burke (Black Cherry Blues: A Dave Robicheaux Novel)

"The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. "
— Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul: Memories and the City)

"ESAELP GNITTIPS ON

This mysterious decree would incite me to defy it and spit on the ground at once, but because the police were stationed two steps away in front of the Governor's Mansion, I'd just stare at it uneasily instead. Now I began to fear that spit would suddenly climb out of my throat and land on the ground without my even willing it. But as I knew, spitting was mostly a habit of grown-ups of the same stock as those brainless, weak-willed, insolent children who were always being punished by my teacher. Yes, we would sometimes see people spitting on the streets, or hawking up phlegm because they had no tissues, but this didn't happen often enough to merit a decree of this severity, even outside the Governor's Manson. Later on, when I read about the Chinese spitting pots and discovered how commonplace spitting was in other parts of the world, I asked myself why they'd gone to such lengths to discourage spitting in Istanbul, where it had never been popular."
— Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul: Memories and the City)

"Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed."
— Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul: Memories and the City)

"I don't care what a man is. I mean, a great artist is like a great doctor. I don't care how racist he is. If he can show me how to operate on a heart so that I can cure a brother, or cure someone else, I don't give a damn what the man thinks; he has taught me something. And that is valuable to me. And that is valuable to others and man as a whole. "
— Ernest J. Gaines (Conversations With Ernest Gaines)

"Everything's been said, but it needs saying again."
— Ernest J. Gaines (Conversations With Ernest Gaines)

"Well, in San Francisco if someone's against you, they know how to vote you out of an area. If someone's against you in Louisiana, or if I wrote a book and they did not like it or me in Louisiana, they might shoot me anytime."
— Ernest J. Gaines (Conversations With Ernest Gaines)

"The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly."
— Ernest J. Gaines (Conversations With Ernest Gaines)

"...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not."
— Ernest J. Gaines (Conversations With Ernest Gaines)

"I hope when I die, they won't put on my tombstone, 'He wrote Miss Jane Pittman.' Put anything else, but don't put just that. "
— Ernest J. Gaines (Conversations With Ernest Gaines)