"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)

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

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
— Milan Kundera

"Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after."
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

"I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it."
— Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"I don’t mean to make a big deal out of sobriety, by the way. Of all the modes of human consciousness available to the modern consumer I consider it to be the most overrated."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"There were so many Pittsburgh poets in my hallway that if, at that instant, a meteorite had come smashing through my roof, there would never have been another stanza written about rusting fathers and impotent steelworkers and the Bessemer convertor of love."
— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

"On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for."
— Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)