"Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as a secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh."
— Leonard Cohen (The Favorite Game)

"The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world."
— Leonard Cohen

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"I have no mission. No one has."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."
— Milan Kundera

"There is no perfection only life"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."
— Milan Kundera

"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."
— 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)

"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)

"Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul. "
— Nabokov Vladimir. (Lolita. Mashenka. Zaschita Luzhina.)

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Lolita, luz de mi vida, fuego de mis entrañas. Mi pecado, mi alma. Lo-li-ta: la punta de la lengua emprende un viaje de tres pasos desde el borde del paladar para apoyarse, en el tercero, en el borde de los dientes. Lo.Li.Ta.

Era Lo, sencillamente Lo, por la mañana, un metro cuarenta y ocho de estatura con pies descalzos. Era Lola con pantalones. Era Dolly en la escuela. Era Dolores cuan­do firmaba. Pero en mis brazos era siempre Lolita"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. "
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past."
— Michael Ondaatje

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
— Oscar Wilde

"...cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable."
— Oscar Wilde

"Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do."
— Oscar Wilde

"I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays)

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."
— Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)

"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is."
— Oscar Wilde (The Canterville Ghost)

"Ambition is the last refuge of the failure"
— Oscar Wilde

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes."
— Oscar Wilde

"A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young."
— Oscar Wilde

"Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them."
— Oscar Wilde

"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are... In this country, people die at 21. They die emotionally at 21, maybe younger... My responsibility as an artist is to help people get past 21... The films are a roadmap through emotional and intellectual terrain that provides a solution on how to save pain."
— John Cassavetes

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. "
— George Bernard Shaw

"Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable."
— Woody Allen

"Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it."
— Woody Allen

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

""He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"A singe metaphor can give birth to love. "
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"When someone tells you they’ve just bought a house, they might as well tell you they no longer have a personality. You can immediately assume so many things: that they’re locked into jobs they hate; that they’re broke; that they spend every night watching videos; that they’re fifteen pounds overweight; that they no longer listen to new ideas. It’s profoundly depressing. "
— Douglas Coupland (Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture)

""‘Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.’""
— Douglas Coupland (Generation X)

"I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. and we're very very pissed off."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra..."
— Chuck Palahniuk