"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time.
She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic."
— Woody Allen

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
— Malcolm X

"Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Is sex dirty? Only when it's being done right."
— Woody Allen

"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole."
— Malcolm X

"Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions."
— Aldous Huxley

"Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them."
— Alice Sebold

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
— E.L. Doctorow

"Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Beautiful thing, the destruction of words. "
— George Orwell

"When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against. "
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own."
— Woody Allen

"Tis' better to live your own life imperfectly than to imitate someone else's perfectly."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it."
— Tallulah Bankhead

"When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"If a man is highly sexed he's virile.
If a woman is, she's a nymphomaniac.
With them it's power
but with us it's a disease!
Even the act of sex is called penetration!
Why don't they call it enclosure?"
— Gemma Hatchback

"My life is routine. I wake up early in the morning. I brush my teeth. I sit on the floor of the cell I do not go to breakfast. I stare at a gray cement wall. I keep my legs crossed my back straight my eyes forward. I take deep breaths in and out, in and out, and I try not to move. I sit for as long as I can I sit until everything hurts I sit until everything stops hurting I sit until I lose myself in the gray wall I sit until my mind becomes as blank as the gray wall. I sit and I stare and I breathe. I sit and I stare. I breathe."
— James Frey (My Friend Leonard)

"Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. "
— James Frey (My Friend Leonard)

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"Life is for the living. Don't let the fear of striking out let you from keep you from playing the game."
— Laurie Halse Anderson

"I am a better person when I have less on my plate."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself."
— Julie Gregory (Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood)

"I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
In a way, being an addict is very proactive."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting."
— Ariel Gore (Atlas of the Human Heart: A Memoir)

"I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or gears?"
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"If I am truly to become an autonomous woman, then I must take over that role of being my own guardian...I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained."
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don't think you can, hold on."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"You either save yourself or you remain unsaved."
— Alice Sebold (Lucky)

"I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening."
— Mark Vonnegut (The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity)

"...They flank me-Depression on my left, loneliness on my right. They dont need to show their badges. I know these guys very well.

...then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there. Depression even confiscates my identity;but he always does that.

-Page 47"
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need."
— Marya Hornbacher

"'God, I love you so much I won't ever try to have sex again.'"
— Ben Neihart (Burning Girl)

"eventually, everything goes away."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"There is no fear. Absolutely no fear. When one lives without fear, one cannot be broken. When one lives with fear one is broken before one begins to live."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"“Hey, Ocean Eyes,” my father said. “Where’d you go on us?” "
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"That was beautiful.
She is holding my hand.
No, it wasn't.
If she let go, I would fall apart.
It was. It was beautiful because it was honest and it was beautiful because it hurt and it was beautiful because you didn't have to tell it to me.
Fall apart.
It makes me feel like shit.
"
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my sould to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"“The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked.
“A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said.
“Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?”"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. "
— Alice Sebold

"'You look invincible,' my mother said one night.
I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:
'I am.'"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"I turn and I slowly walk away and I don't look back. It has always been a fault of mine, but it is the way I am. I never look back. Never."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music."
— Ross David Burke (When the Music's Over)

"Mr. Freeman sighs. "No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you!"
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)