"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true."
— Paulo Coelho

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."
— Paulo Coelho

"What's the world's greatest lie?... It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate."
— Paulo Coelho

"Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist - Gift Edition)

"Love simply is."
— Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)

"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

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"... I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out. "
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together."
— Nicole Krauss

"'If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.'"
— Nicole Krauss

"The truth is the thing I invented so I could live."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. I wish I could draw you."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"Why is love intensified by absence?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action."
— James Russell Lowell

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within. "
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"it s important to read a book but also hold the book to smell the book...it s perfume it s incense it s the dust of Egypt..."
— Ray Bradbury

"Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go."
— Ray Bradbury

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."
— William Shakespeare

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
— Albert Einstein

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
— Albert Einstein

"Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
— Sylvia Plath

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you."
— Jane Austen (Persuasion)

"I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday"
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
— Sylvia Plath

"How we need another soul to cling to."
— Sylvia Plath

"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father refuse thy name, thou art thyself thou not a montegue, what is montegue? tis nor hand nor foot nor any other part belonging to a man
What is in a name?
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
So Romeo would were he not Romeo called retain such dear perfection to which he owes without that title,
Romeo, Doth thy name!
And for that name which is no part of thee, take all thyself....
- (Act II, Scene II)"
— William Shakespeare (Romeo And Juliet)