"Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!"
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot"
— Jane Austen (Persuasion)

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"Sorry," [Hamlet] said, rubbing his temples. "I don't know what came over me. All of a sudden I had this overwhelming desire to talk for a very long time without actually doing anything."
— Jasper Fforde

"Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time."
— Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair)

"It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. ...It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as the players-more if they are moderately restless."
— Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)

"It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time."
— Bill Bryson

"Wait. Why am I thinking about Krispy Kremes? We’re supposed to be exercising."
— Meg Cabot (Big Boned)

"Unrequited love is all right in books and things, but in real life, it completely sucks"
— Meg Cabot (Haunted)

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!"
— Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility)

"You must know... surely, you must know it was all for you. You are too generous to trifle with me. I believe you spoke with my aunt last night, and it has taught me to hope as I'd scarcely allowed myself before. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes have not changed, but one word from you will silence me forever. If, however, your feelings have changed, I will have to tell you: you have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"What are men to rocks and mountains?"
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"I am a badass, and I recognize that you, too, are a badass"
— Cassandra Clare (City of Bones)

"“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, and then throw it in the
face of the person who gave you the lemons until they give you the
oranges you originally asked for.""
— Cassandra Clare

"Sarcasm is the last refuge of the imaginatively bankrupt. "
— Cassandra Clare (City of Bones)

"Other crack teams get bat boomerangs and wall-climbing powers; we get Aquatruck.

-Clary"
— Cassandra Clare (City of Ashes)

""Jesus!" Luke exclaimed.
"Actually, it's just me," said Simon. "Although I've been told the resemblance is startling."
"
— Cassandra Clare

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will."
— Charlotte Brontë

"If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly."
— Charlotte Brontë

"Friendship however is a plant which cannot be forced -- true friendship is no gourd spring up in a night and withering in a day."
— Charlotte Brontë

"Like magic, she felt him getting nearer, felt it like a pull in the pit of her stomach. It felt like hunger but deeper, heavier. Like the best kind of expectation. Ice cream expectation. Chocolate expectation"
— Sarah Addison Allen (The Sugar Queen)

"We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come, dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."
— Alan Moore (Absolute Watchmen)

"We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment. And by making the moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is no audience. There are no instruments. There are only bodies and thoughts and murmurs and looks. It's the concert rush to end all concert rushes, because this is what matters. When the heart races, this is what it's racing towards."
— Rachel Cohn (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)

"Gotta protect the little dudes. I tried an AK-47, but it wouldn't fit under my seat. I like the Uzi better, anyway. It looks better with the dress. The AK seems too casual to me"
— Janet Evanovich

"A woman's heart is such a complex problem - the owner thereof is often most incompetent to find the solution to this puzzle."
— Baroness Emmuska Orczy

"'When will you give up these mad adventures, and leave others to fight their own battles and to save their own lives as best they may?'

'When your ladyship has ceased to be the most admired woman in Europe, namely, when I am in my grave.'"
— Baroness Emmuska Orczy (Scarlet Pimpernel, The)

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
— Douglas Adams

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"How could you receive a member of the Male Sex in your bedroom, and in your dressing gown?Sir, I must request you to leave immediately1

You don't mean to tell me that's a dressing gown? interrupted Mr Carlton, a dangerous gleam in his eyes. Well, it's by far the most elegant one I've ever been priviledged to see, and I suppose I must have seen scores of 'em in my time-paid for them too!"
— Georgette Heyer

"Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another."
— Lemony Snicket

"A good library will never be too neat or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk."
— Lemony Snicket

"A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories."
— Ray Bradbury

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

"The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."
— Ray Bradbury

"A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine."
— Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine)

"There they go, my friend, right into the sunset. And even though it happens to be overcast at the moment, let's pretend it isn't, because it's just that much nicer."
— Adrienne Kress (Alex and the Ironic Gentleman)

"Libraries are forever."
— Elaine Svenonius (The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization)

"The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book..."
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

"My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid."
— Joan Bauer

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

"That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library."
— Aphra Behn (The Lucky Chance)