"She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
— Robert Fulghum (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

"If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
— Maya Angelou

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, Special 75th Anniversary Edition)

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, 'How many good things have you done in your life?' rather he will ask, 'How much love did you put into what you did?'"
— Mother Teresa

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"May you live every day of your life."
— Jonathan Swift

"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"If you can't fly then run, if you can't run the walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary."
— Mark Twain

"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. "
— Mother Teresa

"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we're alone."
— Mitch Albom

"It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithlessand therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments."
— Oriah Mountain Dreamer

"Unless you love someone, nothing else makes sense."
— e.e. cummings

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change."
— Katharine Hepburn (Me: Stories of My Life)

"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
— Mary Oliver

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others -- The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, becuase I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release...

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exit."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work. "
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be."
— James Frey (My Friend Leonard)

"I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"There is no fear. Absolutely no fear. When one lives without fear, one cannot be broken. When one lives with fear one is broken before one begins to live."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"life is hard, kid. you gotta be harder. you gotta take it on and fight for it and be a fucking man about how you live it. if you're too much of a pussy to do that, then maybe you should leave, 'cause you're dead already"
— James Frey

"The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"'Is it hard?'
'Not if you have the right attitudes. Its having the right attitudes thats hard.'"
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values)

"If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything."
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.""
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

""Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.""
— Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values)

"Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you."
— Sarah Dessen (This Lullaby)

"Don't think or judge, just listen."
— Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)