"So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall."
— Roald Dahl

"I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect."
— J.D. Salinger

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would stll be on their way south, the deers would be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be YOU. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that exactly. You'd just be different that's all... I mean you'd be different in some way- I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it. -Holden"
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"God knows what is in me in place of me."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because t's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my single bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
— Albert Camus

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselssly into the past."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."
— Stephen King

"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
— Albert Camus

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"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

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless."
— Oscar Wilde

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--"
— G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

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