""our state cannot be severed, we are one./One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.""
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"Grace was in all her steps,
heaven in her eye,
in every gesture dignity and love.

Paradise Lost"
— John Milton

"He who reigns within himself and rules his passions desires and fears is more than a king. "
— John Milton

"Abash'd the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is,....."
— John Milton

"If not Victory, revenge! "
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"He left it in thy power, ordaind thy will
By nature free, not over-rul'd by Fate
Inextricable, or strict necessity; "
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt."
— Michael Chabon (Summerland)

"Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you. "
— Philip Roth

"The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. "
— Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)

"He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense."
— Philip Roth (American Pastoral)

"These girls with old gents don't do it despite the age—they're drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why? In Consuela's case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and my
status give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation. But simultaneously, to give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woman with authority of a kind she cannot get in a sexual arrangement with a younger man. She gets both the pleasures of submission and the pleasures of mastery."
— Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)

"Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing."
— Philip Roth

"The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you."
— Philip Roth (The Human Stain)

"'Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.'"
— Philip Roth

"No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives."
— Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)

"My
God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you
shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs
and bullets —no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!"
— Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint)

""And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.'""
— Philip Roth

"How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard."
— Philip Roth (The Professor of Desire)

"There are no uncontaminated angels"
— Philip Roth

"You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more."
— Philip Roth (The Dying Animal)

""How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?""
— Philip Roth

"The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocial. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers."
— Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
"
— Angela Carter

"I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off."
— Angela Carter

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.

The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

--speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962"
— John Steinbeck

"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything."
— John Steinbeck

"The quality of owning freezes you forever in "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we."
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

"What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction."
— Harold Brodkey (This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death)

"I figured I had kept her from being too depressed after fucking--it's hard for a girl with any force in her and any brains to accept the whole thing of fucking, of being fucked without trying to turn it on its end, so that she does some fucking, or some fucking up; I mean, the mere power of arousing the man so he wants to fuck isn't enough; she wants him to be willing to die in order to fuck. There's a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for, as beasts, for childbearing when childbearing might kill them, and child rearing when the child might die at any moment: it's in women to live under that danger, with that risk, that close to tragedy, with that constant taut or casual courage. They need death and nobility near. To be fucked when there's no drama inherent in it, when you're not going to rise to a level of nobility and courage forever denied the male, is to be cut off from what is inherently female, bestially speaking."
— Harold Brodkey

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit."
— Margaret Atwood

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
All of them?
Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."
— Margaret Atwood

"Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."
— Margaret Atwood

"Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye"
— Margaret Atwood

"And she finds it difficult to believe -- that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy."
— Margaret Atwood

"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté."
— Margaret Atwood

"Gardening is not a rational act."
— Margaret Atwood

"The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor."
— Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"Hmm, that's not sexual harassment, baby. When I decide to get sexual, trust me, you'll know it.

~ Braden ~"
— Lora Leigh (Megan's Mark (Breeds, #7))

"Wolves eat cats for dinner. By God, I wanna be a wolf.

~Kane Tyler~"
— Lora Leigh (Elizabeth's Wolf (Breeds, #3))

"Let's not get naughty.
How about homicidal instead
—Cam and Jaci"
— Lora Leigh (Wicked Pleasure)