"Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four a.m."
— Wally Lamb

"The simple question 'What color do you want to paint that upstairs room?' might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: 'How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you?'"
— Donald Antrim

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
— Anthony Burgess

"Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these."
— Susan B. Anthony

"'The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.'"
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"Who is Fox?", I asked.
"Policeman Fox is the third of us," said the Sergeant, "but we never see him or hear tell of him at because he is always on his beat and never off it and he signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep. He is as mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes."
— Flann O'Brien (The Third Policeman)

"'This is a people shooting hat,' I said. 'I shoot people in this hat.'"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)