"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
— 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

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,/ Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find."
— Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

"Belize: The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate. "
— Tony Kushner

"The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs."
— Tony Kushner

"Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?"
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Pt.1: Millennium Approaches)

"In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead."
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika)

"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

" If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.
"
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours"
— Alan Bennett (The History Boys: The Film)

"What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do. "
— Alan Bennett

"...But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all."
— Alan Bennett (Writing Home)

"Everybody has a heart. Except some people."
— Bette Davis

"It's pain that changes our lives."
— Steve Martin (Shopgirl: A Novella)

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)