"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh?' he whispered.
'Yes, Piglet?'
'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.'"
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. "
— C.S. Lewis

"Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!"
— Emily Brontë

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"Live.
Love.
Learn.
Let go."
— Oliver Granger

"Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding"
— Saul Williams (Said the Shotgun to the Head)

"Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us."
— Marianne Williamson

"“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never loses. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? "
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot."
— Arabic proverb

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."
— Dr. Seuss

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

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

"That, they never could lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never endure the notion of their children laying their heads on their pillows; in short , that there never more could be , for them or theirs , any laying of heads upon pillows at all , unless the prisioner's head was taken off.

The Attorney General during the trial of Mr. Darnay "
— Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

"Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more."
— Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

"I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. Its all a question of how I view my life."
— Paulo Coelho

"I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness,

unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness,

and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things
"
— William Saroyan (My Heart's in the Highlands)

"The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are."
— Anita Shreve

"Societies in decline have no use for visionaries."
— Anaïs Nin

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."
— Wendell Berry

"The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows. Now warm, now chill, next joyous, then despairing, the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him, no matter how stable, even loving. No ties, no binding chains, save those he forges for himself. Or so he thinks. But escape can be delusion, and what he is running from is not the enclosing world and its inhabitants, but his own inadequate self that fears to meet the demands which life makes upon it. Therefore create. Act God. Fashion men and women as Prometheus fashioned them from clay, and, by doing this, work out the unconscious strife within and be reconciled. While in others, imbued with a desire to mold, to instruct, to spread a message that will inspire the reader and so change his world, though the motive may be humane and even noble--many great works have done just this--the source is the same dissatisfaction, a yearning to escape."
— Daphne du Maurier (The Loving Spirit)

"As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day."
— Atwood, Margaret

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done with love is well done."
— Vincent Van Gogh

"life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one"
— Stella Adler

"Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production. "
— Raymond Chandler

"“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty........ but
when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is
wrong.”
"
— Richard Buckminster Fuller

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"I believe in God, I call it simply Nature."
— Frank Lloyd Wright

"I heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved."
— Shana Abé

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone."
— Dorothy Parker

"The covers of this book are too far apart."
— Ambrose Bierce

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Laozi

"Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake."
— Jon Stewart

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
— George Carlin

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."
— Virginia Woolf

"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

"Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"You can do anything you want. You don't believe me. You think, she's out of her head. Yeah, I'm out of my head- on being me. What are you on? On being them. You don't even know. I bet you were never given a chance to know. ....Listen. You can be anything you want to be. Be careful. It's a spell. It's magic. Listen to the words.... You are anything...everyone, anyone. ...You listen to them, teachers, parents, politicians. They're always saying, if you steal you're a thief, if you sleep aroung you're a slut, if you take drugs you're a junkie. They want to get inside your head and control you with their fear. ...Don't play their game. Nothing can touch you; you stay beautiful. "
— Melvin Burgess (Smack)

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

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
— Jessamyn West

"We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN."
— B.W. Powe (Towards a Canada of Light)

"When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more."
— C.S. Lewis

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
— C.S. Lewis