"“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”"
— Sylvia Plath

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
"
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"You can't edit a blank page"
— Jodi Picoult

"He began to trace a pattern on the table with the nail of his thumb. "She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B.""
— Jodi Picoult (The Pact: A Love Story)

"And that's all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we - each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better. "
— Ernest J. Gaines (A Lesson Before Dying)

""I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.""
— Ernest J. Gaines (A Lesson Before Dying)

"I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening. . . . I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books."
— Kathleen Norris ("The Prodigal Reader," Ruminator Review, Summer 2002

"Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
Counting this row and that row of moccasins
Waiting on the silent shelf."
— Anne Sexton

"Depression is boring, I think
and I would do better to make
some soup and light up the cave."
— Anne Sexton

"O starry night, This is how I want to die"
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone. "
— Anne Sexton

"Now I am going back
And I have ripped my hand
From your hand as I said I would
And I have made it this far ..."
— Anne Sexton

"Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead."
— Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton)

"The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives"
— Anne Sexton

"It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own."
— Arthur Conan Doyle

"'I followed you.'

'I saw no one.'

'That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.'"
— Arthur Conan Doyle

"Death in anonymity is the ultimate insult to human dignity."
— Kathy Reichs (Break No Bones)

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."
— Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)

"If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong."
— Jasper Fforde (The Big Over Easy)

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind."
— Henry James

"People, generally, suck."
— Christopher Moore

"So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall."
— Roald Dahl

"It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. "
— Augusten Burroughs (Magical Thinking: True Stories)

"Live to the point of tears."
— Albert Camus

"It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Well-read people are less likely to be criminals."
— Lemony Snicket

"It's a lot easier to be lost than found. It's the reason we're always searching and rarely discovered--so many locks not enough keys."
— Sarah Dessen (Lock and Key)

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

"Wherever you will go,
I will let you down,
But this lullaby goes on. "
— Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You)

"Everyone has their weak spot. The one thing that, despite your best efforts, will always bring you to your knees, regardless of how strong you are otherwise."
— Sarah Dessen (Lock and Key)

"If this was my forever, I wouldn't want to spend it here. "
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place."
— Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You)

"Like a word on a page that you’ve printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign. And you feel scared for a second, like you’ve lost something, even if you’re not sure what it is"
— Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)

"Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. you get use to the weight, how it holds you in place"
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"You save yourself or you remain unsaved."
— Alice Sebold

"She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. "
— Alice Sebold

"'You look invincible,' my mother said one night.
I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:
'I am.'"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain...remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder."
— Sylvia Plath

"I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them."
— Sylvia Plath

"I am I. "
— Sylvia Plath

"You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel)

"For the few little outward successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgiving and self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"“ I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.""
— Sylvia Plath