"Why should things be easy to understand?"
— Thomas Pynchon

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."
— Milan Kundera

"And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.""
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Words are loaded pistols."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Space is not only high, it's low. It's a bottomless pit."
— Sun Ra

"When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit."
— Miles Davis

"Existence— well, what does it matter?
I've existed for the best use i can
The past is now part of my future
The present is well out of hand."
— Ian Curtis

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. "
— William S. Burroughs

"Never do business with a religious son-of-a-bitch. His word ain't worth a shit -- not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal."
— William S. Burroughs

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact. "
— William S. Burroughs

"I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it. My affections, being concentrated over a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits."
— William S. Burroughs

""What do you want out of life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
"I don't know," she said. "Just wait on tables and try to get along." She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. "
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

""I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."
"Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.""
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"On no days of our childhood did we
live so fully perhaps as those we
thought we had left behind without
living them, those that we spent with
a favourite book."
— Marcel Proust

"I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"One begins to go about with the sluggish step of a philosopher or a clochard, as more and more vital gestures become reduced to mere instincts of preservation, to a conscience more alert not to be deceived than to grasp truth."
— Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch)

"Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being."
— John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse)

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death."
— William S. Burroughs