"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"You're the strangest person I ever met, she said & I said you too & we decided we'd know each other a long time. "
— Brian Andreas

"Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue."
— Eugene O'Neill

"The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
— Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)

"She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS."
— Henry James

"Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain."
— Henry James

"A cat is a responsibility after all. And feeding and keeping and caring about a stupid fat cat isn't much, isn't much in the entirety of what counts for being a person and the huge range of what people do,but it is something. It is something and it's something that's warm and that I still have."
— Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts)

"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"If I knew that today would be the last time I’d see you, I would hug you tight and pray the Lord be the keeper of your soul. If I knew that this would be the last time you pass through this door, I’d embrace you, kiss you, and call you back for one more. If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this is the last time I see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past"
— Gabriel García Márquez

""If you can capture a woman's imagination, then you will have her. But imagination is a strange creature. It needs time and distance to function properly." The Flirt (pg 288)

"
— Kathleen Tessaro (The Flirt)

"you may fume and fidget as you please: but this is the best plan to pursue with you, I am certain. I like you
more than I can say; but I’ll not sink into a bathos of sentiment: and with this needle of repartee I’ll keep you
from the edge of the gulf too; and, moreover, maintain by its pungent aid that distance between you and myself most conducive to our real mutual advantage."
— Charlotte Brontë

"Patience – A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue."
— Ambrose Bierce

"a young woman in love always looks like patience on a monument smiling at grief"
— William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."
— Ayn Rand

"Do you ever think if poeple heard our conversations they'd lock us up?"
"All the time.""
— Wendy Mass (Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life)

"The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks."
— Tennessee Williams

"Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry."
— Jack Kerouac

"Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering."
— Charles Dickens

"[My guru] says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel."
— Graham Greene (The Comedians)

"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."
— George Moore

"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real. "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again."
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?"
— Erma Bombeck

"I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome.
"Okay," he said. He took a breath. "What would you do, if you could do anything?"
I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. "This," I said. And then I kissed him."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"Miss Barry was a kindred spirit after all," Anne confided to Marilla, "You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she is. . . Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you."
— Walt Whitman

"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)

"She felt the abyss of disenchantment."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely."
— Pam Brown

"In those days, I didn't understand anything. I should have judged her according to her actions, not her words. She perfumed my planet and lit up my life. I should never have run away! I ought to have realized the tenderness underlying her silly pretensions. Flowers are so contadictory! But I was too young to know how to love her."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Anyone can be passionate but it takes real lovers to be silly."
— Rose Franken

"Jocelyn: Better a silly girl with a flower than a silly boy with a horse and a stick.
Wat: It's called a lance. Heeellllloooo? "
— A Knight's Tale

"And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."
— Annie Proulx (The Shipping News : A Novel)

"Needless to say, I had been alone on other occasions during the year. Needless to say, my girlfriend was only two hours away by plane. Needless to say, after a busy day, what could be better than a stroll through the narrow streets and lanes of the old city, without having to talk to anyone, simply enjoying the beauty around me. And yet the feeling that surfaced was one of oppressive, distressing loneliness – not having someone with whom I could share the city, the walk, the things I’d like to say.

..there is nothing worse than the feeling that no one cares whether we exist or not, that no one is interested in what we have to say about life, and that the world can continue turning without our awkward presence."
— Paulo Coelho

"Cats are to dogs what modern people are to the people we used to have. Cats are slimmer, cleaner, more attractive, disloyal, and lazy. It's easy to understand why the cat has eclipsed the dog as modern America's favorite pet. People like pets to possess the same qualities they do. Cats are irresponsible and recognize no authority, yet are completely dependent on others for their material needs. Cats cannot be made to do anything useful. Cats are mean for the fun of it. In fact, cats possess so many of the same qualities as some people (expensive girlfriends, for instance) that it's often hard to tell the people and the cats apart."
— P.J. O'Rourke (Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People)

"Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days
and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible
and nothing can change that; neither new
girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or
God. "
— Charles Bukowski

"

'Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.'
"
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"If you don't love another living soul, then you'll never be disappointed."
— Charlotte Brontë

"There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness."
— Thomas Hardy (A Pair of Blue Eyes)

"where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice?"
— Victor Hugo

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
— James Baldwin

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— Anaïs Nin

"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such"
— Henry Miller

"What greater gift than the love of a cat."
— Charles Dickens

"“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”"
— Jean Cocteau