"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"Young Castle called me "Scoop." "Good Morning, Scoop. What's new in the word game?"

"I might ask the same of you," I replied.

"I'm thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?"

"Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out."

"Or the college professors."

"Or the college professors," I agreed. I shook my head. "No, I don't think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed."

"I just can't help thinking what a real shake up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems..."

"And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?" I demanded.

"They'd die more like mad dogs, I think--snarling & snapping at each other & biting their own tails."

I turned to Castle the elder. "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolation of literature?"

"In one of two ways," he said, "petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system."

"Neither one very pleasant, I expect," I suggested.

"No," said Castle the elder. "For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!""
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"There is no WHY, since the moment simply is, and since all of us are simply trapped in the moment, like bugs in Amber."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Dance Like No One is Watching...
Love Like You Have Never Been Hurt Before...
Go to Work Like You Don't Need The Money."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"What you can become is the miracle you were born to be through the work that you do."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just
crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which
is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “Ce n’étais pas moi!”
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 skateboard 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

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
— Jonathan Safran Foer- extremely loud & incredibly close

"One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"What is being awake if not interpreting our dreams, or dreaming if not interpreting our wake?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"... I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything"
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"They do not desire anything more than everything they have known."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong."
— D.H. Lawrence (Women in Love)

"It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)

"When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper."
— D.H. Lawrence

"One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul."
— D.H. Lawrence

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
— D.H. Lawrence

"Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."
— D.H. Lawrence

"As we all know, too much of any divine thing is destruction"
— D.H. Lawrence

"Life is meant to be spent, not saved."
— D. H. Lawrence

"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)

"What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements."
— Anaïs Nin

"'If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.'"
— Nicole Krauss

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake)

"Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you."
— Neil Gaiman

"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter."
— Marlene Dietrich

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
— Elbert Hubbard

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too."
— Pablo Neruda

"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"It's amazing how people can sound like retards when they're talking to their girlfriend, especially if they really love her a lot. Because when you're just fucking someone you make a point of keeping your cool, but when you're really in love - it can sound pretty repulsive."
— Etgar Keret (The Nimrod Flipout: Stories)

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."
— Neil Gaiman

"my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living."
— Pablo Neruda

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"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)

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large -- I contain multitudes."
— Walt Whitman

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
— Walt Whitman