"Reality continues to ruin my life."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

"The craving to risk death is our last great perversion. We come from night, we go into night. Why live in night?"
— John Fowles (The Magus)

"It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did."
— John Fowles (The Magus)

"I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning."
— Orhan Pamuk

"[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation."
— Orhan Pamuk (The Black Book)

"Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head."
— Orhan Pamuk (The New Life)

"What is hell? I still maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead)

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering..."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Writing a book is a horrible,
exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
— George Orwell

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."
— George Orwell

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Politics and the English Language, 1946"
— George Orwell