"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama."
— Tennessee Williams

"What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding it's breath."
— Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)

"My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet."
— Edith Wharton

"For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . ."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways."
— Edith Wharton

"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
— Oscar Wilde

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

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

"There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask."
— Edith Wharton

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."
— Samuel Beckett

"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
— Samuel Beckett

"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that."
— Samuel Beckett

"Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self Reliance)

"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
— Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau)

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!"
— Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire)

"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."
— Tennessee Williams

"How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
— Milan Kundera

"“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”"
— Milan Kundera

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
— Milan Kundera

"Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me."
— Gertrude Stein

"Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path. "
— Carl Sagan

"While much is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."
— Thomas Hardy

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing."
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

"Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style."
— R.L. Stine