"Il y a des beautés qui sautent aux yeux et d'autres qui sont écrites en hyéroglyphes: on met du temps à déchiffrer leur splendeur mais, quand elle est apparue, elle est plus belle que la beauté."
— Amélie Nothomb

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time."
— Haruki Murakami

"She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, "I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No one wants their life thrown into chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these two attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"My ambition is handicapped by laziness"
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. "
— Charles Bukowski

"there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late"
— Charles Bukowski

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way."
— Charles Bukowski

"I wanted the whole world or nothing."
— Charles Bukowski (Post Office)

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"God isn't chocolate, he's the encounter between chocolate and the palate capable of appreciating it."
— Amélie Nothomb

"I told you- I got tired of trying to stay away from you. So I'm giving up."
— Edward- Stephanie Meyer

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"Women are like teabags; you never know how strong they are until they're put in hot water."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb...," He murmured.
"What a stupid lamb, " I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion."
— Stephenie Meyer

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
— Elbert Hubbard

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."
— Dr. Seuss

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."
— Dr. Seuss

"Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.""
— William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)

"'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam)

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
— John Keats

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."
— John Keats

"Touch has a memory."
— John Keats

"In tutte le coppie che si amano c'è sempre nella donna una caratteristica unica come la sua, su cui per un attimo lo sguardo dell'uomo si fissa con intensità. Una spirale infinita dove uno si rispecchia nell'altro."
— Banana Yoshimoto (Lizard)

"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not."
— Kurt Cobain

"The duty of youth is to challenge corruption."
— Kurt Cobain

"You are my sweetest downfall. I loved you first, I loved you first."
— Regina Spektor

"People who love horror films are people with boring lives... when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films - they act as shock absorbers - and if they disappeared altogether, I bet you'd see a big leap in the number of serial killers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news."
— Ryu Murakami (In the Miso Soup)

"Mamoru, please say it once more. -Usagi
Again? But I've said it 50 times! -Mamoru
Please? One more time? -Usagi
Okay, for the last time. Marry me, Usagi. -Mamoru "
— Naoko Takeuchi

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, 'How many good things have you done in your life?' rather he will ask, 'How much love did you put into what you did?'"
— Mother Teresa

"In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times."
— Charles Baudelaire

"Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants de soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils."
— Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs Du Mal)

"We all received invitations, made by hand from construction paper, with balloons containing our names in Magic Marker. Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies was so great that we had to compare one another's invitations before we believed it. It was thrilling to know that the Lisbon girls knew our names, that their delicate vocal cords had pronounced their syllables, and that they meant something in their lives. They had had to labor over proper spellings and to check our addresses in the phone book or by the metal numbers nailed to the trees."
— Jeffrey Eugenides

"I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)