"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde

"Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly"
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

"Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us."
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas)

"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface."
— Virginia Woolf

"Growing up is loosing some illusions, in order to acquire others."
— Virginia Woolf

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."
— Virginia Woolf

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

"It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)

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

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

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
— Oscar Wilde

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."
— Oscar Wilde

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
— Oscar Wilde

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"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)

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
— Oscar Wilde

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
— Oscar Wilde

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
— Oscar Wilde

"With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? "
— Oscar Wilde

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures"
— Oscar Wilde

"Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive"
— Oscar Wilde

"Every woman is a rebel."
— Oscar Wilde

"“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely
precious things that cannot be taken from you.”"
— Oscar Wilde

"You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas"
— Oscar Wilde

"Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow."
— Oscar Wilde

"The sky was pure opal now."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"...the great events of the world take place in the brain..."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar."
— Oscar Wilde

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic."
— Oscar Wilde

"all of us have a place in history. mine is clouds."
— Richard Brautigan

"[...] the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?"
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

"Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion."
— Jack Kerouac

"Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream"
— Jack Kerouac

"There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road: The Original Scroll)

"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other." To the children and the innocent it's all the same."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"beautiful insane
in the rain"
— Jack Kerouac (The Subterraneans)

"I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet,
concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree
in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that
Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream.
Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds.
But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright
forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands
and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence
inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson
you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds
long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity.
It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do
with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere:
Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing.
It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about.
I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression,
they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away?
Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence
of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because
it was never born."
Selected Letters 1957-1969 and is a letter he wrote to his first wife, Edie in 1957."
— Jack Kerouac (The Portable Jack Kerouac)

"My witness is the empty sky."
— Jack Kerouac

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Jack Kerouac

"Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.""
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass)

"He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream, too."
— Lewis Carroll