"May she wake in torment!" he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. "Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.
"
— Hart Crane

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
— Isabel Allende

""This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd. See, here it is--
I hold it towards you.""
— John Keats

"Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (Prometheus Unbound)

" 134. Letters are Commonplace
Letters are commonplace enough, yet what splendid things they are! When someone is in a distant province and one is worried about him, and then a letter suddenly arrives, one feels as though one were seeing him face to face. Again, it is a great comfort to have expressed one's feelings in a letter even though one knows it cannot yet have arrived. If letters did not exist, what dark depressions would come over one! When one has been worrying about something and wants to tell a certain person about it, what a relief it is to put it all down in a letter! Still greater is one's joy when a reply arrives. At that moment a letter really seems like an elixir of life."
— Sei Shonagon (The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon)

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language"
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail --
Assent -- and you are sane --
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --
And handled with a Chain --"
— Emily Dickinson

"Poetry: the best words in the best order."
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."
— William Butler Yeats

"'Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never would.'"
— Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell)

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi (The Illuminated Rumi)

"When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply I may forget."
— Christina Rossetti (The Complete Poems)

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."
— Confucius

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
— Ernest Hemingway

"There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.""
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
— Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

"Never give up. No one knows what's going to happen next."
— L. Frank Baum

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. "
— Plato

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"l'enfer, c'est les autres"
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"All the darkness in the world can't extinguish the light from a single candle."
— Francis Of Assisi (The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi)

"Lord, make me chaste... but not yet."
— Augustine of Hippo

"If a man insisted on always being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it."
— Herodotus

"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. 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: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"They can be like the sun, words.
They can do for the heart what light can for a field."
— John of the Cross (The Poems of St. John of the Cross)

"And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
"
— Dylan Thomas

"I die, but when the grave shall press
The heart so long endeared to thee
When earthly cares no more distress
And earthly joys are nought to me

Weep not, but think that I have past
Before thee o'er a sea of gloom
Have anchored safe and rest at last
Where tears and mourning cannot come

'Tis I should weep to leave thee here
On the dark ocean sailing drear
With storms around and fears before
And no kind light to point the shore

But long or short though life may be
'Tis nothing to eternity
We part below to meet on high
Where blissful ages never die"
— Emily Brontë (The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë)

"I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

"But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose."
— Anne Brontë

"I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still."
— Arthur Rimbaud (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works)

"Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville."
— Paul Verlaine

"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."
— Émile Zola

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."
— William Wordsworth

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

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

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

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero