"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"Sure, it was your idea and your fly, but he caught the big fish. Remember, fairness is a human idea largely unknown in nature."
— John Gierach (Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders : A John Gierach Fly-Fishing Treasury)

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and
farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your
thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance."
— Brian Tracy (Focal Point: A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals)

"You dont love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
— Oscar Wilde

"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"Angry people are not always wise."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it."
— Jodi Picoult (Vanishing Acts)

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies"
— Jodi Picoult (Keeping Faith)

"Big Brother is Watching You."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it. "
— Jodi Picoult (Nineteen Minutes)

"Do you know how sometimes - when you are riding your bike and you start skidding across sand, or when you miss a step and start tumbling down the stairs - you have those long, long seconds to know that you are going to be hurt, and badly?"
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall."
— Jodi Picoult

"The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination."
— Dan Millman (Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives)

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."
— George Orwell (1984)

"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better."
— George Orwell (1984)

"It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Four legs good, two legs bad."
— George Orwell (Animal Farm)

"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad."
— George Orwell (1984)

"You are a slow learner, Winston."
"How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal."
— George Orwell (1984)

"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."
— George Orwell (1984)

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
— George Orwell (1984)

"There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"Just as modern motorways have no room for ox-carts or wandering pedestrians, so modern society has little place for lives and ways that are too eccentric."
— A.C. Grayling (The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life)

"It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation"
— Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)

"You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest."
— Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"What a piece of work is a man"
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing."
— Marya Hornbacher (Madness: A Bipolar Life)

"Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?
O'Brien: Of course he exists.
Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?
O'Brien: You do not exist. "
— George Orwell

"I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us"
— Kahlil Gibrán (The Madman)