"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it."
— Mark Twain

"Faith is believing what you know ain't so. "
— Mark Twain

"People who truly love us can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive us our worst sins. Rarely do you find someone capable of both."
— Jonathan Carroll

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."
— Arthur Conan Doyle

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
— Isaac Asimov

"I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."
— Robert E. Howard

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"When one has nothing left make ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship."
— George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman and the Mountain of Light)

"Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible."
— Frank Herbert

"There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story."
— Frank Herbert

"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it."
— Frank Herbert

"What do you despise? By this are you truly known."
— Frank Herbert

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

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

"More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."
— Truman Capote (Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel)

"Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools."
— Truman Capote

"I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."
— Truman Capote

"Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering..."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"To live without hope is to cease to live."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The formula ‘two and two make five’ is not without its attractions."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
— Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another."
— Charles Dickens

"You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
— Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)

"What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner."
— Colette

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
— James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)

"The joy that isn't shared dies young."
— Anne Sexton

"Next to music beer was best."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"I think we look for the differences in people because it makes us less lonely."
— Carson McCullers

"But all the time-no matter what she was doing-there was music."
— Carson McCullers

"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain."
— William Faulkner

"A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…."
— William Faulkner

"You can't. You just have to."
— William Faulkner

"It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow."
— William Faulkner

"Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them."
— Paul Auster

"It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not."
— Paul Auster

"Dismantling the architecture of my discontent"
— Paul Auster

"Men can starve from a lack of self realization as much as they can from a lack of bread."
— Richard Wright