"Art isn't a product. It's an experience"
— Lori Lansens (The Girls)

"Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you."
— Neil Gaiman

"How cruel it must be for a man to live past his soul."
— Lori Lansens (The Girls)

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'.
Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'"
— Charles M. Schulz

"I think the secret to a hoppy life is a selective memory. Remember what you are most grateful for and quickly forget what your not."
— Richard Paul Evans (Grace: A Novel)

"I want to know God's thoughts - the rest are mere details."
— Albert Einstein

""sometimes it's the fight that makes a thing worth having""
— Richard Paul Evans (Finding Noel: A Novel)

"Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently."
— Maya Angelou

" I lie to myself all the time, but I never believe me."
— S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)

"Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?"
— Richard Paul Evans (The Christmas Box Miracle : My Spiritual Journey of Destiny, Healing and Hope)

""Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you.""
— Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)

"I've come to know that what we want in life is the greatest indication of who we really are (p. 331)."
— Richard Paul Evans (The Gift: A Novel)

"No relationship is perfect, ever. There are always some ways you have to bend, to compromise, to give something up in order to gain something greater...The love we have for each other is bigger than these small differences. And that's the key. It's like a big pie chart, and the love in a relationship has to be the biggest piece. Love can make up for a lot."
— Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)

"Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life. "
— Richard Paul Evans (The Christmas Box)

"I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed. "
— Sarah Dessen

"I have come to believe that we do not walk alone in this life. There are others,
fellow sojourners, whose journeys are interwoven with ours in seemingly random patterns,
yet, in the end, have been carefully placed to reveal a remarkable tapestry. I believe
God is the weaver at that loom.
"
— Richard Paul Evans

"There comes a time in every life when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your heart."
— Sarah Dessen

"I am not a believer in love at first sight. For love, in its truest form, is not the thing
of starry-eyed or star-crossed lovers, it is far more organic, requiring nurturing and time
to fully bloom, and, as such, seen best not in its callow youth but in its wrinkled maturity.
Like all living things, love, too, struggles against hardship, and in the process sheds
its fatuous skin to expose one composed of more than just a storm of emotion–one of loyalty
and divine friendship. Agape. And though it may be temporarily blinded by adversity,
it never gives in or up, holding tight to lofty ideals that transcend this earth and
time–while its counterfeit simply concludes it was mistaken and quickly runs off to
find the next real thing."
— Richard Paul Evans (The Letter)

"Sometimes it seems safer to hold it all in, where the only person who can judge is yourself."
— Sarah Dessen

"We carry around in our heads these pictures of what our lives are supposed to look like, painted by the brush of out intentions. It's the great, deep secret of humanity that in the end none of our lives look the way we thought they would. As much as we wish to believe otherwise, most of life is a reaction to circumstances."
— Richard Paul Evans (The Sunflower: A Novel)

"There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying."
— Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)

"That which we expect of life is indeed all that it ever can be."
— Richard Paul Evans (The Locket)

"It's just that...I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire-it extinguishes the small and inflames the great"
— Richard Paul Evans (The Sunflower: A Novel)

"It was just one of those things," I said, "You know, that just happen. You don't think or plan. You just do it."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

""...even the most horribl e of nightmares is laced with the promise of dawn.""
— Richard Paul Evans

"“I have learned a great truth of life. We do not succeed in spite of our challenges and
difficulties, but rather, precisely because of them.”
"
— Richard Paul Evans (The Looking Glass: A Novel)

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum: A Novel)

"Love is never convenient-and rarely painless"
— Richard Paul Evans (The Sunflower: A Novel)

"Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?"
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

""We are chained to that which we do not forgive""
— Richard Paul Evans (The Locket)

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

Dead Poet's Society"
— John Keating

"Chocolate is God's apology for brocolli"
— Richard Paul Evans (The Sunflower: A Novel)

"Reality continues to ruin my life."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate."
— Lisa See (Shanghai Girls: A Novel)

"I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness."
— Bill Watterson

"We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that's been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left in the world who shares my memories of our childhood, our parents, our Shanghai, our struggles, our sorrows, and, yes, even our moments of happiness and triumph. My sister is the one person who truly knows me, as I know her. The last thing May says to me is 'When our hair is white, we'll still have our sister love.'"
— Lisa See (Shanghai Girls: A Novel)

"As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway."
— Bill Watterson (The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes)

"The most important story we'll ever write in life is our own-not with ink, but with our daily choices."
— Richard Paul Evans

"It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."
— Bill Watterson

"For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life."
— Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan)

"Calvin: You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.
Hobbes: What mood is that?
Calvin: Last-minute panic."
— Bill Watterson

"When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul."
— Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan)

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

""I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.""
— Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan)

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much."
— Mother Teresa

"I never hold a grudge. As soon as I get even with the son-of-a bitch, I forget it."
— W.C. Fields

"A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen

"I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. "
— W.C. Fields