"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"The only truth is music"
— Jack Kerouac

"My witness is the empty sky."
— Jack Kerouac

"Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken."
— Jack Kerouac

"We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."
— Jack Kerouac

"I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't make any difference."
— Jack Kerouac

"It all ends in tears anyway."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on..."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book thief without the words.

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing."
— Markus Zusak

"A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love,
often deciphered by children"
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I am haunted by humans."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. (Death)"
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"My heart is so tired"
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I have to say that although it broke my heart, I was, and still am, glad I was there."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. "
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Even death has a heart. "
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"With wild eyes that had seen freedom."
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)

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

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
— Anaïs Nin

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
— Anaïs Nin

"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
— Anaïs Nin

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
— Anaïs Nin

"Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves"
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin)

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."
— Anaïs Nin (Journals of Anais Nin Volume 3)

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"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)

"The only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor: A Novel)

"What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)