"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited)

"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?"
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst. "
— Vladimir Nabokov

"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"the evolution of sense, in a sense, is the evolution of non sense"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"...I felt instinctively that toilets - as also telephones - happened to be for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch. We all have such fateful objects - it may be a recurrent landscape, a number in another - carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of special significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend."
— Albert Camus

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
— Albert Camus

"When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune."
— Albert Camus

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
— Albert Camus

"What is a rebel? A man who says no."
— Albert Camus

"The poetry of the earth is never dead."
— John Keats

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
— John Keats

"O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!"
— John Keats (Letters of John Keats)

"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were."
— John Keats

"Already with thee! tender is the night. . .
But here there is no light. . ."
— John Keats

"Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art"
— Virginia Woolf (The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 4)

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'."
— Virginia Woolf (The Waves)

"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's."
— William Blake

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."
— William Blake

"The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself."
— William Blake

"I will not reason and compare my business is to create."
— William Blake

"In heaven, all the interesting people are missing."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Plato was a bore."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
— Albert Einstein

"Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away."
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough."
— John Keats

"But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm."
— Virginia Woolf

"About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone."
— Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

"When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong."
— Virginia Woolf

"People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort."
— Thomas Hardy

"But no one came. Because no one ever does."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness."
— Thomas Hardy (A Pair of Blue Eyes)

"There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child."
— Thomas Hardy (The Woodlanders)

"some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six"
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)