"We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be."
— May Sarton

"Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."
— Thomas Merton

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (A Civil Campaign)

"The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves."
— V.S. Naipaul (In a Free State: A Novel)

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
— e.e. cummings

"All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.

EARTHSEED:THE BOOKS OF LIVING"
— Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower)

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more."
— Patrick O'Brian

"The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. "
— Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."
— Gore Vidal

"....To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately."
— Michel de Montaigne

"People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues."
— Elizabeth Gaskell

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened."
— Michel de Montaigne

"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image."
— Thomas Merton

"A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall."
— Jim Crace (Being Dead: A Novel)

"Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
— Colette

"Then come at once and pause for breath
In chasing wealth. Remembering death
And death's dark fires, mix, while you may,
Method and madness, work and play.
Folly is sweet, well-timed."
— Quintus Horatius Flaccus