"Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most."
— Mark Twain

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."
— Mark Twain

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
— Mark Twain

"Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
— Mark Twain

"A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die."
— Franz Kafka

"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)

"Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens. "
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"That’s the thing with the young these days, isn’t it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish, and short."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"To be is to do - Socrates

To do is to be - Sartre

Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra"
— 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

"No art is possible without a dance with death."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
— Robert Frost

"The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"I don't want to die without any scars."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."
— Oscar Wilde

"Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"If they killed him tonight, at least he would die alive."
— Markus Zusak

"You don't always get what you wish for. Especially in Nazi Germany"
— Markus Zusak

"When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in--that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (A Little Princess)

"If nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open, and so is your heart; and though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that--warm things, kind things, sweet things--help and comfort and laughter--and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett (A Little Princess)