"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts -- not to hurt others."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back."
— Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)

"Oh Jake," Brett said, "We could have had such a damned good time together."
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?""
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)