"“What are you doing here?” [ndr prison]
“Selling Girl Scout cookies,” I said. “Want some? The Samoas are terrific.”
(Max II to Max)"
— James Patterson (Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports)

"Maximum Ride
I don't damsel well distress I can damseling not so much"
— James Patterson

"Okay, okay, okay. I understood that pushing the elevator button over and over again would not make the elevator appear sooner. But I couldn't help myself"
— James Patterson (Sundays at Tiffany's)

""Now, Max, I think we both know your parents aren't missionaries."
I opened my eyes wide. "No? Well, for God's sake, don't tell them. They'd be crushed. Thinking they're doing the
Lord's work and all.""
— James Patterson (School's Out - Forever)

"Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are! (Jane to Mr. Rochester-Ch. 23)"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly."
— Charlotte Brontë

"I will keep the law given by God......Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour............If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? ~ Jane Eyre"
— Charlotte Brontë

"Am I hideous, Jane?

Very, sir: you always were, you know.
"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"'No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,' he began, 'especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?'

'They go to hell,' was my ready and orthodox answer.

'And what is hell? Can you tell me that?'

'A pit full of fire.'

'And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?'

'No, sir.'

'What must you do to avoid it?'

I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: 'I must keep in good health and not die.'"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"I do not think sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will fly, too, as your sisters have all fled before you: but kiss me before you go--embrace me, Jane."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

""Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"I wonder at the goodness of God, the generosity of my friends, the bounty of my lot. I do not repine."
— Charlotte Brontë

""Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now. She will never suffer more in this world. She is gone after a hard, short conflict...Yes there is no Emily in time or on earth now. Yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the chancel pavement. We are very calm at present. Why shoud we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to trouble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them.""
— Charlotte Brontë

"'It is strange,' pursued he, 'that while I love Rosomond Oliver so wildly-with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, and fascinating--I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness, that she would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret. This I know.'"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of the gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best born. My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I shall find some happiness in discharging that office."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

""Hear an illustration, reader.
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses - fancying she has stirred: he withdraws; not for world would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends over her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty - warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus gasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter - by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he find she is stone-dead.
I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin."
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (p. 256)"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear. "
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"All my heart is yours, sir; it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence for ever.
"
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off."
— Stephen King (Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay)

"Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life."
— Stephen King

"I have the heart of a small boy...and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
— Stephen King

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. (from the introduction)"
— Stephen King (Skeleton Crew)

"If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you."
— Stephen King

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
— Stephen King

"The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle."
— Stephen King (Night Shift)

"Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on."
— Stephen King (Bag of Bones)

"I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud. "
— Stephen King

"Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."
— Stephen King

"I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries."
— Stephen King

"Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."
— Stephen King

"If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library."
— Stephen King

"Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics."
— Stephen King

"[A] tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh."
— Stephen King

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar."
— Stephen King

"There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids."
— Stephen King

"When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story."
— Stephen King

"The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there..."
— Stephen King

"Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?"
— Stephen King

"When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time.""
— Stephen King

"The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool."
— Stephen King

"Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back."
— Stephen King (It)

"Invitation to Dance-
It’s a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom.
But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark.
May I have the pleasure?"
— Stephen King

"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen"
— Stephen King

"Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire."
— Stephen King (The Green Mile)

"The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows"
— Stephen King

"You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

"
— Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park/Congo)

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
— Michael Crichton

"And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day."
— Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park)