"Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That's all."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. "
— Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul: Memories and the City)

"I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect"
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party."
— Nick Hornby

"How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.""
— David Foster Wallace

"Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever."
— David Foster Wallace

"There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us---these are just the hazards of being free."
— David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest: A Novel)

"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. "
— David Foster Wallace ("E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction")

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."
— David Foster Wallace

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
— David Foster Wallace

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"The integrity of my sleep has been forever compromised, sir."
— David Foster Wallace

"Dr. Ambrose himself told Mark Nechtr...that the problem with young people, starting sometime in about the 1960s, is that they tend to live too intensely inside their own social moment, and thus tend to see all existence past age thirty or so as somehow postcoital. It's then that they'll relax, settle back, sad animals, to watch- and learn, as Ambrose himself said he learned from hard artistic and academic experience- that life instead of being rated a hard R, or even a soft R, actually rarely even makes it into distribution. Tends to be too slow."
— David Foster Wallace (Girl With Curious Hair)

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

"Play it fuckin' loud!"
— Bob Dylan

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
— Oscar Wilde

"What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration."
— David Foster Wallace (Oblivion: Stories)

"Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly."
— Fernando Pessoa (The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa)

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
— L.P. Hartley

"It may be argued that past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity."
— Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands)

"Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death."
— Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands)

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting"
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools."
— Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands)

"The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained."
— Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands)

"'For God's sake,' the dog is saying, 'open the universe a little more!'"
— Saul Bellow (The Dean's December)

"Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere. (Books have led some to knowledge and some to madness.)"
— Francesco Petrarca

"It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads."
— Theodor W. Adorno

"It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads."
— Theodor W. Adorno

""Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier")."
— David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest: A Novel)

"Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehre gern zurück,
den blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.

"
— Gerhard Scholem