"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Life's hard. It's even harder when you're stupid."
— John Wayne

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you."
— Paulo Coelho

"You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection"
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"When love is not madness it is not love."
— Pedro Calderón de la Barca

"I felt once again the unease of arriving at night in an unknown city--that faint sour panic which seems to cling to a place until one has found oneself a bed."
— Laurie Lee (As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning)

"All of us are subjected to somebody else's power at some point. So once in a while you kiss ass. So what? Either you make your peace with that early, or you end up living your life as a crank and a misfit."
— Sue Grafton

"Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiter for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness. "
— Ann Brashares

"Don't ever let go of the ones that you love, because only they can save you from yourself"
— Evan Marsh

""You'll never be a wonderful woman or even a wonderful human being until you learn to have some regard for human frailty." "
— Bing Crosby

"For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"'We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.""
— John Updike (Brazil)

"There is a root arrogance in any writer; a hugely arrogant assumption that anyone is going to listen to them."
— Bono

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-
witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the
simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if
he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of
doubt, what is laid before him.
"
— Leo Tolstoy

"It takes much bravery to stand up to our enemies but we need as much bravery to stand up to our friends."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

"It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption."
— F.L. Lucas

"He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little."
— Quintus Horatius Flaccus

"Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart… Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered."
— John Berger

"Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive."
— Gil Bailie

"I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stand on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman speaks, "Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks. "Yes," I say, "it will. It is because the nerve was cut." She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. "I like it," he says, "It is kind of cute." "All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works."
— Richard Selzer (Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery)

"For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life."
— Orhan Pamuk (Snow)

"There are very few moments in life when you see yourself for what you are. Not how you'd like to be, or how you think other people see you. These moments are very sobering."
— Sabine Durrant (Having It and Eating It)

"No matter how stupid you are you will always be smart enough to fool yourself."
— Andrew Radcliffe

"I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the numbers of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic."
— Lisa Alther

" As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat."
— Ellen Perry Berkeley

"You see, that is the sad, sorry, terrible thing about sarcasm.

It's really funny."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)

"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)

"If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."
— Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)

"We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Love is finding that the things you like best about yourself are not in you at all, but in the person who completes you"
— Orson Scott Card (Sarah: Women of Genesis)

"The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common."
— David Sedaris (Naked)

"Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

""Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called."
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share."
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

"We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters."
— Gloria Steinem

"Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived."
— Shane Claiborne

"After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Do you dance Mr. Darcy?
Not if I can help it."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself. "
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed."
— Ian McEwan

"Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"The soul is healed by being with children."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. "
— Douglas Coupland (Hey Nostradamus!)