"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.-Atticus Finch"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"I don't know that love changes. People change. Circumstances change."
— Nicholas Sparks

"I finally understood what true love meant...love meant that you care for another person's happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be."
— Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)

"Nothing that’s worthwhile is ever easy. Remember that."
— Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)

"When you're struggling with something, look at all the people around you and realize that every single person you see is struggling with something, and to them, it's just as hard as what you're going through."
— Nicholas Sparks (Dear John)

"Celebrate the Sacred in the ordinary."
— Sarah Ban Breathnach

"Write what should not be forgotten."
— Isabel Allende

"I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!"
— Jean Anouilh (Antigone)

"I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives; but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies."
— Jonathan Kozol (The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America)

"You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has."
— Jonathan Kozol (Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation)

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers."
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
— Anna Quindlen

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
— Anna Quindlen

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."
— Zora Neale Hurston

"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you."
— Zora Neale Hurston

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
— Milan Kundera

"Do one thing everyday that scares you."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all."
— Walt Disney Company (Mulan)

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it."
— Lou Holtz

"I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored."
— Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)

"Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city."
— Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)

"It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you."
— Bill Bryson

"Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding."
— Bill Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away)

"It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless. "
— Donald Miller

"...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself..."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things"
— Donald Miller

"Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

""No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?" -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts"
— Donald Miller

"I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Dying for something is easy because it is associated with glory. Living for something is the hard thing. Living for something extends beyond fashion, glory, or recognition. We live for what we believe."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"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)

"There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"Dear me, how I love a library."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone…that’s how the light of God gets in."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to...nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?"
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"...we must take care of our families where-ever we find them."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business."
— Michael J. Fox

"what other people think of me is not my business."
— Michael J. Fox

"It became clearer and clearer to me that I had found a woman who possessed the strength and like-mindedness I'd been hoping to locate my entire adult life. 'In marriage, choose someone you're comfortable solving problems with' was an aphorism I'd been acquainted with. I had long ago concocted my own turbocharged version, which better fit my own history and worldview. The blessing to be carefully preserved, I'd concluded, is a partner with whom you're not only be able to endure a crisis but whose companionship you could continue to enjoy in spite of the crisis. It became apparent that I might have found exactly that."
— Evan Handler (It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive)

"There is no dishonor in losing the race. There is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid to lose."
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"Of course I loved books more than people."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)