"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
— Italo Calvino

"The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.'"
— Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices."
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"If I could dream at all it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"The talking came earlier." I groaned. "What did you hear?" His gold eyes grew very soft. "You said you loved me." "You knew that already," I reminded him, ducking my head. "It was nice to hear, just the same." I hid my face against his shoulder. "I love you," I whispered. "You are my life now," he answered simply."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"I may not be human, but I am a man. -Edward Cullen"
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"There’s something…strange about the way you two are together… The way he watches you—it’s so…protective. Like he’s about to throw himself in front of a bullet to save you or something. He's very intense about you… and very careful. I feel like I don't really understand your relationship."
— Stephenie Meyer (Eclipse)

"Believing takes practice."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

"Don't try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

"Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"But outside the door to our Spanish class, leaning against the wall-looking more like a Greek god than anyone had a right to-Edward was waiting for me."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly."
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time)

""And you are worried, not because you're headed to meet a houseful of vampires, but you think those vampires won't approve of you, correct?"
"That's right," I answered immediately, hiding my suprise at his casual use of the word.
He shook his head. "You're incredible""
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

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

"...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good."
— Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel)

"Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead."
— Lionel Shriver (The Post-Birthday World)

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..."
— Dr. Seuss

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

"If things start happening, don't worry, don't stew, just go right along and you'll start happening too."
— Dr. Seuss

"So be sure when you step, Step with care and great tact. And remember that life's A Great Balancing Act. And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed! (98 and ¾ percent guaranteed) Kid, you'll move mountains."
— Dr. Seuss (Oh, the Places You'll Go!)

"And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more. "
— Dr. Seuss

"You'll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You'll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left."
— Dr. Seuss (Oh, the Places You'll Go!)

"'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.'"
— Margery Williams Bianco (The Velveteen Rabbit)

"He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter."
— Margery Williams Bianco (The Velveteen Rabbit)

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see? And the moment's over. You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.... The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air"
— Carolyn Parkhurst (The Dogs of Babel)

"All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me.""
— Carolyn Parkhurst (The Dogs of Babel)

"It's always gratifying to share a hobby with a friend, and pining for erstwhile suitors falls into that category. In the months to come, Libby and I would analyze our respective exes with the gusto and intellectual rigor of Jesuits."
— Patricia Marx (Him Her Him Again The End of Him)

"What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding it's breath."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen."
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one's life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment."
— Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young—alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the cross–roads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here to–night, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things."
— Virginia Woolf

"Love is never any better than the lover. "
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion."
— Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)

"" Here's something else to think about: calling when you say you're going to is the very first brick in the house you are building of love and trust. If he can't lay this one stupid brick down, you ain't never gonna have a house baby, and it's cold outside.""
— Greg Behrendt (He's Just Not That Into You (The Newly Expanded Edition): The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys)