""There's more to life than books you know, but not much more.""
— Morrissey

"Whatever it is, I'm against it."
— Groucho Marx

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

"Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. "
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort."
— Virginia Woolf

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them...well I have others."
— Groucho Marx

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Other Writings:)

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped."
— Groucho Marx

"I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else. "
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her."
— Agatha Christie

"One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late."
— Agatha Christie

"For three months,
a person sits and looks at you,
imagining a kiss."
— Etgar Keret

"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived."
— Oscar Wilde

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

"Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"Tumbling-hair
picker of buttercups
violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
also picking flowers"
— E. E Cummings (Poems, 1905-1962)

"nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

-excerpt of #35 from "100 Selected Poems"
— e.e. cummings

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobodies worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

"What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

"I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

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

"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

"If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!"
— Woody Allen

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Literature seemed to be everything then. People looked to it for the strength to live, for guidance, for revelation."
— Ryszard Kapuściński

"He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door."
— Etgar Keret (Gaza Blues)

"There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed."
— Etgar Keret

"How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory)

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
— William Butler Yeats (The Wind Among the Reeds 1899)

"If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can
I prize thy love more than whole mines of Gold.
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold repay,
Then while we live, in love let's so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever."
— Anne Bradstreet

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away. "
— Raymond Chandler

"To say goodbye is to die a little."
— Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye)

"Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency."
— Raymond Chandler

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
— Groucho Marx

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate ... She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back."
— Giorgio Bassani

"Everyone was nowhere to be seen"
— Geoff Dyer

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)