""This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere." "
— A.S. Byatt, Possession

"A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love indifference and dislike, also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forbears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else, too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole waste of time to come."
— A.S. Byatt

"There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.
"
— Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon)

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
— Tim O'Brien

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen."
— Tim O'Brien

"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark - I'm on fire almost - I'm burning away into nothing - but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
— James Baldwin (Sonny's Blues)

"Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did."
— James Baldwin (Sonny's Blues)

"It doesn't have to be this way...Whatever else is lost, the knowledge isn't. Just because things get out of hand, just because things get smashed, just because everything comes apart, it doesn't mean that it always has to be that way, now and forever. Whether it's care that does it or sheer blind luck, things can work, things can grow, things can change and still stay together. If only they get enough chances, things can work out in the end. We're here, aren't we? In all our awesome complexity, we're here, even though we started out as nothing but ambitious dirt, nothing but clever clay. And in the end, one way or another, we'll find a way to get it all together, to make things work. That's life, May. That's what real life is all about."
— Brian M. Stableford

"Heavenly witnesses are a tricky lot, to be used by whoever is closest to Heaven at the time. And legend and theology, which are designed to sanctify our fears, crimes, and aspirations, also reveal them for what they are."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of M.M. Michelet and Renan, of Mr. Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself, with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, and mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman."
— A.S. Byatt

"And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others."
— Ralph Ellison

"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat."
— Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)

"Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.
[...]
We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.
"
— Gene Wolfe (Shadow & Claw)

"Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them."
— Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove)

"The most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings--as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and the human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars."
— Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)

"We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything."
— Charles de Lint

"There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page."
— Charles de Lint (Dreams Underfoot (Newford Book 1))

"She knew this music--knew it down to the very core of her being--but she had never heard it before. Unfamiliar, it had still always been there inside her, waiting to be woken. It grew from the core of mystery that gives a secret its special delight, religion its awe. It demanded to be accepted by simple faith, not dissected or questioned, and at the same time, it begged to be doubted and probed."
— Charles de Lint (The Little Country)

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least to say. It's taken for granted that he has no voice and his reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced--since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgment on a man than an idea. "
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

""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

"He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto--or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second. Men have not found the words for it, nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don’t help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don’t work for my happiness, my brothers--show me yours--show me that it is possible--show me your achievement--and the knowledge will give me courage for mine."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"And that must end us, that must be our cure:
To be no more. Sad cure! For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish, rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night
Devoid of sense and motion?"
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

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

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."
— Frank Herbert (Dune)

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
— James Baldwin

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"You - you alone will have the stars as no one else has them...In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night...You - only you - will have stars that can laugh."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (El Principito / The Little Prince)

"...Horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
— Dr. Seuss

"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"My library was dukedom large enough"
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

"It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party."
— Nick Hornby

"Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries
which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be."
— Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it."
— Terry Pratchett

"In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye. "
— Terry Pratchett (The Truth)

"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."
— Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

"She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't."
— Terry Pratchett (Equal Rites)

"If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story."
— Terry Pratchett (The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents)

"'Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things' "
— Terry Pratchett

"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
— Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."
— Neil Gaiman

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)