"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
— Albert Camus

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
— Albert Camus

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount."
— Haruki Murakami

"Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?"
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives. "
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work."
— Haruki Murakami

"Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint."
— Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Life is no way to treat an animal."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Well finish your story anyway."

"Where was I?"

"The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses."

"Oh, yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed after bed we found dead people.

"And Father started giggling," Castle continued.

"He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head and do you know what that marvelous man said to me?" asked Castle.

"Nope."

"'Son,' my father said to me, 'someday this will all be yours.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"All right - I'll tell you what you did for me: you went for happy, silly, beautiful walks with me."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Bluebeard)

"Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Bagombo Snuff Box)

"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were big things."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)"
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windemere's Fan)

"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."
— Oscar Wilde

"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible."
— Deepak Chopra

"In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you."
— Deepak Chopra

"Silence is the great teacher and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it. There is no substitute for the creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability that come from knowing how to contact your core of inner silence."
— Deepak Chopra

"You will be transformed by what you read."
— Deepak Chopra

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

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

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

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams (The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul)

"'This must be Thursday,' said Arthur to himself, sinking low over his beer. 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays.'"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
— Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything)

"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."
— Douglas Adams

"'Did I do anything wrong today,' he said, 'or has the world always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to notice?'"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"'Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.' (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)"
— Douglas Adams

"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre and that I am therefore excused from saving universes."
— Douglas Adams

"...Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I'm completely in favor of the
separation of Church and State.
... These two institutions screw us up enough
on their own, so both of them together is
certain death."
— George Carlin