"Enjoy it. Because it's happening."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"There's nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"It was the kind of kiss that made
me know that I was never so happy in my whole life."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don't want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it, too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me.
"
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Personally, I like to think my brother is having a college experience like they do in the movies. I don't mean the big fraternity party kind of movie. More like the movie where the guy meets a smart girl who wears a lot of sweaters and drinks cocoa. They talk about books and issues and kiss in the rain. I think something like that would be very good for him, especially if the girl were unconventionally beautiful. They are the best kind of girls, I think. I personally find 'super models' strange. I don't know why this is."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
— Milan Kundera

"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)

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has."
— Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)

"
The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life's most intense fullfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into new 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)

"The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people."
— Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)

"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
— Tom Robbins

"Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning."
— Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)

"Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; the world is a wonderfully weird place; consensual reality is significantly flawed; no institution can be trusted, but love does work; all things are possible; and we all could be happy and fulfilled if we only had the guts to be truly free and the wisdom to shrink our egos and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously."
— Tom Robbins

"If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you believe in love, acting lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act every which way, that's perfectly valid - but don't go out trying to sell your beliefs to the system. You end up contradicting what you profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to change the world, change yourself."
— Tom Robbins

"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
— Tom Robbins

"There are only two mantras, yum and yuck, mine is yum."
— Tom Robbins

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"The function of the artist is to provide what life does not."
— Tom Robbins

"Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need."
— Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)

"There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul."
— Edith Wharton

"What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast."
— Edith Wharton

"My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet."
— Edith Wharton

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"
— Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence)

"I've dreamed in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; They've gone through and through me like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."
— Emily Brontë

""I want what we all want," said Carl. "To move certain parts of the interior of myself into the exterior world, to see if they can be embraced.""
— Jonathan Lethem (You Don't Love Me Yet: A Novel)