""There's hope left in these dusty chords. There's a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains.""
— Frank Herbert

"The singular multiplicity of this universe draws my deepest attention. It is a thing of ultimate beauty.

Leto II"
— Frank Herbert

" This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here — the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos."
— Frank Herbert (Heretics of Dune)

"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

"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

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

"If the Doors of Perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it truly is - infinite."
— William Blake

"Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius."
— William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A Facsimile in Full Color)

""Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.""
— Kathy Acker

"Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies."
— Kathy Acker

"i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed."
— Kathy Acker (Pussy, King of the Pirates)

"If you ask me what I want, I'll tell you. I want everything."
— Kathy Acker (Pussy, King of the Pirates)

"There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?"
— William S. Burroughs

"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"What is hell? I still maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"To love someone means to see him as God intended him"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"Indeed, people speak sometimes about the "animal" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"God knows what is in me in place of me."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"In a morbid condition, dreams are often distinguished by their remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality. The resulting picture is sometimes monstrous, but the setting and the whole process of the presentation sometimes happen to be so probable, and with details so subtle, unexpected, yet artistically consistent with the whole fullness of the picture, that even the dreamer himself would be unable to invent them in reality, though he were as much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev. Such dreams, morbid dreams, are always long remembered and produce a strong impression on the disturbed and already excited organism of the person.Raskolnikov had a terrible dream."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Is not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Idiot)

"Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"It was a marvelous night, the sort of night one only experiences when one is young. The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (White Nights and Other Stories)

"I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent."
— William Gibson

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley

"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."
— Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point)

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."
— Aldous Huxley

"I like being myself. Myself and nasty."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."
— Aldous Huxley

"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"I am I, and I wish I weren't."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."
— Aldous Huxley

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."
— Aldous Huxley

"Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations."
— Aldous Huxley

"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."
— Aldous Huxley

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"'I'd rather be myself,' he said. 'Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.'"
— Aldous Huxley