"At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The things you own end up owning you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense."
— Jane Austen

"She doesn't understand that a writer is a special creature--that I'm different from everyone else. I'm not saying I'm superior to other people, just more sensitive, I guess."
— Christopher Moore (Bloodsucking Fiends)

"Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. "
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"The world was hers for the reading."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless. And as I walked back to give Takumi’s note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

""Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that i was not lost, but home.""
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war"
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"...you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."
— John Green

"What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
— Jane Austen

"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

"Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says 'you are nothing', I will be a writer."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Gonzo)

"The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment."
— T.H. White

"Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"If there is one thing I can't stand, it is stupidity. I always say that stupidity is the Sin against the Holy Ghost."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"Might does not make right! Right makes right!"
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"We cannot build the future by avenging the past."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"The world should take note: not everything is getting worse."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort."
— Jane Austen

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

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

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)