"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Bean Trees)

"The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedent."
— Norman Mailer

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
— Margaret Atwood

"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)

"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)

"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans.
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your hear that every day is the best day of the year."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

""The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away."
"
— Barbara Kingsolver

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
— Hannah Arendt

"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
— Hannah Arendt

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."
— Hannah Arendt

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."
— Hannah Arendt

"I am what I am not yet."
— Maxine Greene

"I feel like a wet seed, wild in the hot, blind earth.

~Dewey Dell"
— William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)

"People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."
— Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)

"The father wants the girl to be a weather girl on television, or to marry and have babies. She doesn't want to be a TV weather girl. Nor does she want to marry and have babies. Not yet. Maybe later, but there are so many other things she must do in her lifetime first. Travel. Learn how to dance the tango. Publish a book. Live in other cities. Win a National Endowment for the Arts award. See the Northern Lights. Jump out of a cake."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

""Nobody's perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him....""
— Christopher Moore (Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal)

"If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)