"There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive?

The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks from the springs of the bed."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can be poisonous. I wish people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please-a little less love, and a little more common decency."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If somebody says "I love you" to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol holder requires? "I love you, too.""
— Kurt Vonnegut (Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons)

"The problem with designing something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again."
— Douglas Adams

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If you can do no good, at least do no harm."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slapstick)

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did.'"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?"
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."
— Lemony Snicket

""Some of us get dipped in flat, some in satin, some in gloss...." He turned to me. "But every once in a while, you find someone who's iridescent, and when you do, nothing will ever compare.""
— Wendelin Van Draanen (Flipped)

"People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict."
— Lemony Snicket (The Grim Grotto)

"If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats."
— Lemony Snicket (The Wide Window)

"A good library will never be too neat or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear."
— Lemony Snicket (The Carnivorous Carnival)

"All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk."
— Lemony Snicket

"Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily."
— Lemony Snicket (The Beatrice Letters)

"What was a foreigner, anyway? Is the place you're born the only place you really belong? At what point do you stop being from "away" and start being from "here"?"
— Blue Balliett (The Calder Game)

"Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms."
— Lemony Snicket (The Beatrice Letters)

"Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it would be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it."
— Lemony Snicket (The Wide Window)

"It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"In most cases, the best strategy for a job interview is to be fairly honest, because the worst thing that can happen is that you won't get the job and will spend the rest of your life foraging for food in the wilderness and seeking shelter underneath a tree or the awning of a bowling alley that has gone out of business."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do, it makes you want to hide under the coffee table."
— Lemony Snicket

"Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?"
— Lemony Snicket

"To hear the phrase "our only hope" always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn't work, there is nothing left."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"Having a personal philosophy is like having a pet marmoset, because it may be very attractive when you acquire it, but there may be situations when it will not come in handy at all."
— Lemony Snicket (The Grim Grotto)

"Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else."
— Lemony Snicket (The End)

"Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the in the dark about being in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nontheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park. "
— Lemony Snicket (The End)

"The major problem- one of the major problems, for there are several- one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of whom manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree."
— Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary)

"Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is one big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too."
— Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret)

"Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist - Gift Edition)

"Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused."
— Paulo Coelho

"Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they're not. When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing. They can stay together for hours, even days. They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or--such is the pleasure they experience--they may never finish it. No eleven minutes for them."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly? Life moves very fast. It rushes from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Love is not a habit, a commitment, or a debt. It isn't what romantic songs tell us it is - love simply is."
— Paulo Coelho