"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment."
— Eckhart Tolle

"You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are."
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"Man made God in his own image..."
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge."
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"Life isn't as serious as my mind makes it out to be.

"
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on."
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"The pas has no power to stop you from being present now. Only your grievance about the past can do that."
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"You have so much to learn from your enemies."
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
"
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"

'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)

"I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Just make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes, remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of the poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to"
— Janet Fitch

"How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?"
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you could begin to imagine."
— Janet Fitch

"It's such a liability to love another person."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"There are millions of people in the world and the spirits will see that most of them, you never have to meet. But there are one or two you are tied to, and the spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right."
— Jodi Picoult (Picture Perfect)

"Torn between fear and something that resembled love, she wrestled with questions she never dreamed she would face: How could she leave? Then again, how could she stay?"
— Jodi Picoult (Picture Perfect)

"...But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?"
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?"
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"I know how difficult it can be when the image you've had of something doesn't match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"You might have to lose control before you could find out what you'd been missing."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind."
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring."
— Julia Glass (Three Junes)

"People take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that."
— Julia Glass (Three Junes)

"Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are."
— Julia Glass (Three Junes)

"Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be."
— Julia Glass (Three Junes)

"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 (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"What you had could never make up for what you'd lost."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"Some people don't know what to do with an act of kindness."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"There is a place in you that you don't even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"A lie took two parties - the weaver of the tale and the sucker who so badly wanted to believe it."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. they learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gun powder in an old fashioned gun. then it exploded in your face on a november day in the rain."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"Darkness coiled between what he wanted them to believe and the self he despised. It only made him more alone. How could you save someone when he didn't let you kno him? What a waste. The beauty he murdered in this place. He could never see what he had, only what he failed to achieve."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"...The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)