"Somewhere the zebra is dancing."
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"The car goes where the eyes go."
— Stein, Garth

"That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves"
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"That which you manifest is before you."
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"That which you manifest is before you - Enzo
The Art of Racing in the Rain"
— Garth Stein

"The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts"
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"An' Atticus, When they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things... Atticus, he was real nice...

His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me.

Most people are, Scout. When you finally see them."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for. "
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.
'Your father's right,' she said. 'Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens,don't nest in corncribs,they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Narnia! It's all in the wardrobe just like I told you!
- Lucy Pevensie
"
— C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia)

"Nothing is wonderful except in the abnormal, and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm."
— C.S. Lewis (God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics)

"We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human."
— C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia)

"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see."
— C.S. Lewis

"The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel...is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
— Ursula K. Le Guin

"I think people are very brave and often are a lot more frightened than they're allowed to admit. Life is much harder to live for most people than we want to admit. And so many things take a summoning up of courage. It makes one's own life a little bit easier when you can acknowledge that.
-Ursula LeGuin, interviewed by"
— Brenda Peterson (Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism, and Awakening)

"This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Farthest Shore)

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Lathe of Heaven)

"We walked into the night, into the blurring song of katydids, the thud-splat of raindrops on the umbrella, all those terrible rhythms that take up the inside when you let your guard down. Left you, they drummed. Left you. Left You.

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?"
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth."
"What giants?" Asked Sancho Panza.
"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long."
"Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone."
"Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures."
— Cervantes (Don Quixote)

"Make it thy business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world"
— Cervantes

""The journey is better than the inn"."
— Cervantes (Le siège de Numance)

"Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be."
— Cervantes (Don Quixote)

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
— Ernest Hemingway

"The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend."
— Henry David Thoreau

"When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest."
— Henry David Thoreau

"You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body"
— Henry David Thoreau

"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?"
— Henry David Thoreau

"...be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else's idea of yourself should be."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I have a room all to myself; it is nature."
— Henry David Thoreau

"To be awake is to be completely alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe."
— Henry David Thoreau

"The universe is wider than our views of it."
— Henry David Thoreau

"What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright."
— Henry David Thoreau

"We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives."
— Toni Morrison

"Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot talk, so I listen very well. I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another's conversations constantly. It's like being a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns you down a side street. For instance, if we met at a party and I wanted to tell you a story about the time I needed to get a soccer ball in my neighbor's yard but his dog chased me and I had to jump into a swimming pool to escape, and I began telling the story, you, hearing the words "soccer" and "neighbor" in the same sentence, might interrupt and mention that your childhood neighbor was Pele, the famous soccer player, and I might be courteous and say, Didn't he play for the Cosmos of New York? Did you grow up in New York? And you might reply that, no, you grew up in Brazil on the streets of Tres Coracoes with Pele, and I might say, I thought you were from Tennessee, and you might say not originally, and then go on to outline your genealogy at length. So my initial conversational gambit - that I had a funny story about being chased by my neighbor's dog - would be totally lost, and only because you had to tell me all about Pele. Learn to listen! I beg of you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories."
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"There is no dishonor in losing the race. There is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid to lose."
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"When I return to the world, I will be a man. I will walk among you. I will lick my lips with my small, dexterous tounge. I will shake hands with other men, grasping firmly with my opposable thumbs. And I will teach all people that I know. And when I see a man or a woman or a child in rouble, I will extend my hand, both metaphorically and physically. I will offer my hand. To him. To her. To you. To the world. I will be a good citizen, a good partner in the endeaver of life that we all share."
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"So I was beginning my new life as a anomaly, which figured about as much as it sucked."
— P.C. Cast

"You are old beyond your years Zoeybird. Believe in yourself and you will find a way. But remember darkness does not always equate to evil just like light does not always bring good."
— P.C. Cast (Marked)

"Its not just a sunset; its a moonrise too."
— Pc Cast

""The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express."
"
— — P.C. Cast

"I seek strength, not to be greater than other, but to fight my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself"
— P.C. Cast

"Just when I thought my day couldn't get any worse, I saw the dead guy."
— P.C. and KRISTEN CAST

"Fear and Bigotry are bred fom isolation and ignorance.
-Shekinah"
— P.C. Cast (Untamed)