"Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful."
— Milan Kundera

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
— Milan Kundera

""He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."
"
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
— Milan Kundera

"for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it disrespectful to argue."
— Milan Kundera

"'I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think? Well, tell me!'

His brother was silent and Edward went on: 'If you told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told a man the truth to his face, it would mean I was taking him seriously. And to take something so unimportant seriously means to become less than serious oneself. I, you see, must lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become one of them myself.'"
— Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)

"Write about the emotions you fear the most."
— Laurie Halse Anderson

"She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Songs are as sad as the listener."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others -- The only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"The secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I wanted to touch him, to tell him that even if everyone left everyone, I would never leave him, he talked and talked, his words fell through him, trying to find the floor to his sadness...."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"...Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]..."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Why I'm Not Where You Are"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"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)

"When the day shall come that we do part," he said softly, and turned to look at me, "if my last words are not 'I love you'-ye'll ken it was because I didna have time."
— Diana Gabaldon (The Fiery Cross)

"I talk to you as I talk to my own soul," he said, turning me to face him. He reached up and cupped my cheek, fingers light on my temple. "And Sassenach," he whispered, "Your face is my heart."
— Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber)

"I can bear pain myself, he said softly, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have."
— Diana Gabaldon (Outlander)

"I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love."
— Elizabeth Strout (Abide with Me: A Novel)

"Something that is yours forever is never precious"
— Chaim Potok (My Name Is Asher Lev)

"It never got weird enough for me."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name.

Remembered line from a long-
forgotten poem"
— Hunter S. Thompson (Hell's Angels)

"The edge...there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"“One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.”"
— Loren Eiseley

"We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything."
— Terry Pratchett (Night Watch)

"Albert grunted. "Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?"

Mort thought for a moment.

"No," he said eventually, "what?"

There was silence.

Then Albert straightened up and said, "Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve 'em right."
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

"It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."
— Oscar Levant

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong'.
Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'"
— Charles M. Schulz

"I think I've discovered the secret of life -- you just hang around until you get used to it."
— Charles M. Schulz

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. "
— Orson Welles

"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people."
— Orson Welles

"She has learned that her body is precious and it mustn't be offered carelessly ever again, as it holds a direct connection to her heart."
— Steve Martin (Shopgirl)

"I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet heart."
— Steve Martin (The Pleasure of My Company: A Novel)

"And then there are the times when the wolves are silent and the moon is howling."
— George Carlin

"How come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelette?"
— George Carlin

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'."
— Groucho Marx

"If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong."
— Groucho Marx

"The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
— Groucho Marx

"The sun is high and I’m surrounded by sand.
For as far as my eyes can see
I’m strapped into a rocking chair
With a blanket over my knees
I am a stranger to myself
And nobody knows I’m here
When I looked into my face
It wasn’t myself I’d seen
But who I’ve tried to be.
I’m thinking of things I’d hoped to forget.
I’m choking to death in a sun that never sets.
I clugged up my mind with perpetual grief
And turned all my friends into enemies
And now that past has returned to haunt me.

I’M SCARED OF GOD AND SCARED OF HELL
AND I’M CAVING IN UPON MYSELF
HOW CAN ANYONE KNOW ME
WHEN I DON’T EVEN KNOW MYSELF"
— José Ángel Mañas