"I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!"
— Dr. Seuss

"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"And the turtles, of course...all the turtles are free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be."
— Dr. Seuss

"He who makes a beast out of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
— Dr. Seuss

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
— Anaïs Nin

"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)

"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)

"The sad truth is the truth is sad."
— Lemony Snicket (The Hostile Hospital)

"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 don't want to die without any scars."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame it yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"Think... of the world you carry within you."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun."
— Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)

"How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?"
— Sylvia Plath

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."
— Sylvia Plath

"I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
My eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humour,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

From "Soliloquy of the Solipsist""
— Sylvia Plath (Collected Poems)

"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."
— Sylvia Plath (Collected Poems)

"I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give."
— Sylvia Plath (Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. "
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all"
— Toni Morrison, Beloved

"At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough."
— Toni Morrison

"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."
— Toni Morrison

"When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world"
— Toni Morrison

"I dream a dream that dreams back at me"
— Toni Morrison (A Mercy)

"The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one."
— Emily Brontë (Jane Eyre/Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent/Agnes Grey)

"Lay my head on the railroad line. Train come along; pacify my mind. "
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
"
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness.
We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence."
— Vladimir Nabokov

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

"Is there no way out of the mind?"
— Sylvia Plath

"Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted."
— Sylvia Plath

"You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."
— Anne Lamott

"The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away."
— Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith)

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."
— Anaïs Nin

"People living deeply have no fear of death."
— Anaïs Nin

"I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ"
— Anaïs Nin

"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."
— Anaïs Nin

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."
— Anaïs Nin

"In chaos, there is fertility."
— Anaïs Nin

"You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think."
— Mae West

"Everyone has the right to run his own life- even if you're heading for a crash. What I'm against is blind flying."
— Mae West