"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

"I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."
— George Orwell (1984)

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass."
— Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics)

"The first draft of anything is shit."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me."
— Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot)