"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
— Elbert Hubbard

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"and god help you if you are an ugly girl course too pretty is also your doom cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room and god help you if you are a pheonix and you dare to rise up from the ash a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy while you are just flying back"
— Ani DiFranco

"Don't treat me like I am something that happened to you."
— Ani DiFranco

"I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort, where we overlap."
— Ani DiFranco

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"One day you will kiss a man you can't breathe without, and find that breath is of little consequence."
— Karen Marie Moning (Bloodfever)

"The kiss....was not meant to seduce, it was meant to mark a woman's soul.

Chloe"
— Karen Marie Moning (The Dark Highlander)

"I love books, by the way, way more than movies. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style,park your own car out front. My imagination has always topped anything a movie could come up with. Case in point, those darned Harry Potter movies. That was so not what that part-Veela-chick, Fleur Delacour, looked like."
— Karen Marie Moning (Darkfever)

"Every time I think I’m getting smarter I realize that I’ve just done something stupid. Dad says there are three kinds of people in the world: those who don’t know, and don’t know they don’t know; those who don’t know and do know they don’t know; and those who know and know how much they still don’t know.

Heavy stuff, I know. I think I’ve finally graduated from the don’t-knows that don’t know to the don’t-knows
that do."
— Karen Marie Moning (Bloodfever)

"Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy
can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another
pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy."
— Karen Marie Moning Bloodfever

"Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.""
— Jim Morrison

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally"
— Abraham Lincoln

"Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"I need this wild life, this freedom."
— Zane Grey

"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Freedom lies at the heart of my willingness to lose everything"
— Alanis Morissette

"I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem."
— Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber)

" And he took her in his arms and kissed her under the sunlit sky, and he cared not that they stood high upon the walls in the sight of many."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan."
— David Sedaris (Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)

"The tune was sad, as the best of Ireland was, melancholy and lovely as a lover's tears."
— Nora Roberts (Born in Fire (Born In trilogy #1))

"Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator."
— Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
— Anaïs Nin

"She wanted to go over and hug his tears away, but she was too frightened."
— Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Special Edition)

"Romantic haste in drama brings
tears and sighs when the hero dies
but the curtain fall is final
when in life we take the tragic way
The sunset too is a glorious thing
but with it ends the day."
— C.P. Klapper (The Washington Poems)

"I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extended my hand, whatever the outcome.
"Okay," he said. He took a breath. "What would you do, if you could do anything?"
I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. "This," I said. And then I kissed him."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"I heard what you said. I’m not the silly romantic you think. I don’t want the heavens or the shooting stars. I don’t want gemstones or gold. I have those things already. I want…a steady hand. A kind soul. I want to fall asleep, and wake, knowing my heart is safe. I want to love, and be loved."
— Shana Abé

"Live like you were dying, Love becuase you are"
— Mark Green

"Life doesn't give you a second canvas. So all you can do is paint on. And, sometimes, even over.."
— I Wrote This For You

"Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time."
— Cecelia Ahern

"what a luxury it was for people to hold their loved ones whenever they wanted"
— Cecelia Ahern (PS, I Love You)

"Because I want every breath you take to be empty unless you're close enough to smell me. Every word you speak to be unimportant unless it's to me. Every sound you hear empty unless it's my voice. I want you to remember that whatever pleasure you have from now on, you'll have it from me.
~Rurik Wilder~"
— Christina Dodd (Touch of Darkness)

"Everyone thinks you're so strong and self-confident, but inside you're a frightened child, waiting to suffer betrayal again from those who should love you most."
— Christina Dodd (A Well Pleasured Lady)

"She understood now why her friend Elizabeth, with her near-genius, analytical mind gave wide berth to murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, and horror stories, and read only romance novels. Because, by God, when a woman picked up one of those steamy books, she had a firm guarantee that there would be a Happily-Ever-After. That though the world outside those covers could bring such sorrow and disappointment and loneliness, between those covers, the world was a splendid place to be."
— Karen Marie Moning (Darkfever)

""You've got to let go of who you were, to become who you will be." "
— Janet Fitch

"In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”"
— Janet Fitch

"Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?"
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

""That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out." "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

""I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
"Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. (...) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. they learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gun powder in an old fashioned gun. then it exploded in your face on a november day in the rain."
— Janet Fitch (Paint It Black)

"I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"A fish has no concept of water."
— Janet Fitch

"To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart."
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

"Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind. "
— Janet Fitch (White Oleander)