"I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one."
— Douglas Coupland (Life After God)

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter, try again, fail again, fail better."
— Samuel Beckett

"Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back."
— Samuel Beckett

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

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

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
— Terry Pratchett (Thief of Time)

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this."
— Terry Pratchett

"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it."
— Terry Pratchett

"Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken."
— Terry Pratchett (Eric)

"Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
— Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)

"This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic."
— Terry Pratchett

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
— Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)

"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time"
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty.
The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
And at the other end of the bar the world is full of the other type of person, who has a broken glass, or a glass that has been carelessly knocked over (usually by one of the people calling for a larger glass) or who had no glass at all, because he was at the back of the crowd and had failed to catch the barman's eye. "
— Terry Pratchett (The Truth)

"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it. "
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards."
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more."
— Terry Pratchett

"The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"... was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"... well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told..."
— Terry Pratchett (The Wee Free Men)

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'"
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
— Thomas A. Edison

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
— George Eliot

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead

"...it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."
— Max Ehrmann (Desiderata: A Poem for a Way of Life)

"Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens. "
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in..."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
— Aeschylus

"Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen."
— John le Carré

"She closed one eye and looked at me and said, "I know there is a blessing in this somewhere."

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead: A Novel)

"Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)

"There is so little to remember of anyone - an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming habitual fondness not having meant to keep us waiting long."
— Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping: A Novel)

"As I have told you, I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house -- even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge. I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that's all right. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or a parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause and consequence?"
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"...good fortune is not only good fortune, and over the years things happened in that family that caused some terrible regret. Still, for years it all seemed to me to be blindingly beautiful. And it was."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"We were opposites in every way until we grew up, left home, and discovered we were more alike than we'd thought. Sisters only get to be opposites within the family; separated by the world, they become practically identical."
— Helen Fremont (After Long Silence)

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
— Gabriel García Márquez