"A lie took two parties - the weaver of the tale and the sucker who so badly wanted to believe it."
— Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)

"Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. "
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"The thing that is most hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most wind up in parentheses."
— John Irving

"In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases"
— John Irving (The World According to Garp)

"…there is no nakedness that compares to being naked in front of someone for the first time."
— John Irving (A Widow for One Year)

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default."
— J.K. Rowling

"Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

" Succotash my cocker spaniel, you fudging crevasse-hole dipshiitake!-- Oscar"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"'Do you have any coffee?'...'It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

""it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life"
"
— ~extremely loud and incredibly close

"I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I thought about all of the tings that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive, and I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if I existed at all."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"'Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness, without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"Life must be rich and full of loving--it's no good otherwise, no good at all, for anyone."
— Jack Kerouac (Kerouac: Selected Letters: Volume 1 1940-1956)

"..and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didnt know who I was"
— Jack Kerouac

"It is possible for the human spirit to win after all."
— Jack Kerouac

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children."
— Jack Kerouac

"The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

""Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.""
— Jack Kerouac

"As far as I'm concerned the only thing to do is sit in a room and get drunk"
— Jack Kerouac

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon. "
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"
— e.e. cummings

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
— e.e. cummings

"To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
— e.e. cummings

"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."
— e.e. cummings

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."
— e.e. cummings

"...life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis"
— e.e. cummings

"since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis"
— e.e. cummings

"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."
— e.e. cummings

"love is thicker than forget
more thinner than recall
more seldom than a wave is wet
more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win
less never than alive
less bigger than the least begin
less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly
and more it cannot die
than all the sky which only
is higher than the sky"
— e.e. cummings

"If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time -- the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes -- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever -- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."
— John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail."
— David Sedaris (Naked)

"Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!'"
— David Sedaris

"Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't."
— David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames)

"For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even made it to the bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment."
— David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)