"Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we’ll always have more to give."
— Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World: A Novel)

"All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story."
— Isak Dinesen

"God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

"
— Isak Dinesen

"Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest."
— Isak Dinesen

"The cure for anything is salt water...sweat, tears or the sea."
— Isak Dinesen

""Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.""
— Isak Dinesen

"I'd rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel."
— Terry Pratchett

"My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.
My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat."
— Terry Pratchett

"She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climbs and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes."
— George Gordon Byron

"In solitude, where we are least alone. "
— George Gordon Byron

"The heart will break, but broken live on. "
— George Gordon Byron

"Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company."
— George Gordon Byron

"In secret we met -
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee? -
With silence and tears"
— George Gordon Byron

"And in the end, I lost him. I did it on purpose, the way Garance lost
Baptiste in the crowd. I needed to be alone, I felt. I wanted to be going on alone to my future."
— Susanna Kaysen

"Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide. "
— Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)

"Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously.
Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.

"
— Susanna Kaysen

"Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard."
— Anne Sexton

"I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Here is what unsayable about us: Jonathan and I are members of a team so old nobody else could join even if we wanted them to. What binds us is stronger than sex. It is stronger than love. We're related. Each of us is the other born into a different flesh."
— Michael Cunningham (A Home at the End of the World: A Novel)

"A wolf cannot outrun its shadow"
— Russian proverb

"It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.'"
— John Wick

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish."
— Thomas Wolfe

"If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both -- you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
— Carlos Fuentes

"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."
— Tennessee Williams

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
— Virginia Woolf

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps,
but still attached to life at all four corners."
— Virginia Woolf

"Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?"
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"
— Mark Twain

"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
— Mark Twain

"Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot."
— T.H. White

"'If God is supposed to be merciful,' [Arthur] retorted, 'I don't see why He shouldn't allow people to stumble into heaven, just as well as climb there'"
— T.H. White

"A chaos of mind and body - a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight - a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love, and in Eternity - an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects - a heart to ache or swell- a joy so hoyful and a sorrow so sorrowful that oceans could lie between them..."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"Starkly in an instant she saw herself as she really was-alone in a wood standing among blue shadows with no sounds and the air a sort of black ice. She had no coat. All the people she’d known had forgotten her. Her mother, biting off thread between her teeth, couldn’t hear her, and her father with his eyes turned sorrowfully inward did not see her. They never had. Those she loved did not need her. Lila and Carl danced together in a bubble. Ralph Eastman picked lint from his sleeve. Buddy tucked in his shirttails, jumped in a truck and drove away. Fiona Speed showed the back of her hat, heading downtown in a cab. They all had more important concerns, they were all in their own lives, and there was no room for her. At night their doors were shut and through lit windows she could see them consulting one another, checking the baby, looking after business, licking envelopes, turning back the bedcover, shutting off the light switch, while she was left stranded out in the chill night in the true human state, lost, in the dark, alone. "
— Susan Minot (Evening)

""To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.""
— Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night)

"And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime."
— Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night)

"JEN: What are you scared of?
JACK: I'm scared that I'm gonna end up alone. I'm scared that I'm always gonna be someone's friend, or brother, or confidant but never quite... someone's everything. Mostly I'm scared I'm never gonna meet a guy that I love as much as I love you.
"
— Dawson's Creek Jen and Jack

"Have the courage to fail big and stick around, make them wonder why you're still smiling."
— Elizabethtown

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"Some people stay longer in an hour than others do in a month."
— William Dean Howells

""if only we lost our minds and arrived at our hearts""
— Robert James Waller

"We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us. "
— Robert James Waller

"This is why I'm here on this planet, at this time, Francesca. Not to travel or make pictures, but to love you. I know that now. I have been falling from the rim of a great, high place, somewhere back in time, for many more years than I have lived in this life. And through all of those years, I have been falling toward you."
— Robert James Waller

"An Irish Airman foresees his Death

I Know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love,
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death."
— William Butler Yeats (The Wild Swans At Coole)

"The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love."
— Czesław Miłosz (Selected Poems)

"Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone."
— Czesław Miłosz

"The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will."
— Czesław Miłosz

"I was not meant to live anywhere except in Paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound. When the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries."
— Czesław Miłosz