"Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.

From her graduation commencement address to Berkeley."
— Anne Lamott

"As a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women are a crucial part of that. It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society."
— Anne Lamott

"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"Books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. . . My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean."
— Anne Lamott

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds."
— Douglas Adams

"The problem with designing something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
— Douglas Adams

"When you blame others, you give up your power to change."
— Douglas Adams

"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win."
— Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything)

"Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe."
— Douglas Adams

"Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood...blood...blood...blood..."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"I said I *liked* being half-educated; you were so much more *surprised* at
everything when you were ignorant."
— Gerald Durrell (My Family and Other Animals)

"Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened,"
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Coincidences are the scars of fate."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"We exist as long as somebody remembers us."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"A story is a letter than the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)"
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

""Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that." "
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Chaque livre, chaque volume que tu vois, a une âme. L'âme de celui qui l'a écrit, et l'âme de ceux qui l'ont lu, ont vésc et rêvé avec lui. "
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"Literature, at least good literature, is science tempered with the blood of art. Like architecture or music."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel's Game)

"Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel's Game)

"Dear God, let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be happy; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well-dressed. Let me be sincere- be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."
— Betty Smith

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."
— Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn't control you--you should control them. "
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting."
— Haruki Murakami

"That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"I'm in no position to hand down any advice," he said, "but there's a rule I follow when I don't know what to do."

"A rule?"

"If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule. Whenever I run into a wall I follow that rule, and it always works out. Even if it's hard going at the time."
— Haruki Murakami (Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories)

"What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things."
— Haruki Murakami

"I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)