"She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"Maybe everybody in the whole damn world's scared of each other."
— John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men)

"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last."
— John Steinbeck

"After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do."
— John Steinbeck (The Pastures of Heaven)

"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"I don't know what good it is to know so much and be smart as whips and all if it doesn't make you happy."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting."
— J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)

"When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power of obsessive love."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

"I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister."
— J.K. Rowling

"The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
"
— Walker Percy

"Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected."
— Walker Percy (The Thanatos Syndrome)

"Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him."
— Walker Percy

"You can get all A's and still flunk life."
— Walker Percy (The Second Coming: A Novel)

"It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"There are two ways to look at life. Actually, that’s not accurate; I suppose there are thousands of ways to look at life. But I tend to dwell on two of them. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone’s life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don’t realize it."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don't care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn't matter to anyone who isn't him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life."
— Chuck Klosterman

"Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)

"Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)

"Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."
— Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point)

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together."..."Yes." I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
— Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."
— Ernest Hemingway

"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic
person has a desperate confidence that they won't."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise)

"If you don't want anyone to know about your existence, you might as well kill yourself. You're taking up space, air."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"The only infallible truth of our lives is that everything we love in life will be taken from us."
— Dave Eggers

"I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to."
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
— Mark Twain

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."
— Lemony Snicket

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

"It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter."
— Marlene Dietrich

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."
— Albert Einstein

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity."
— Dorothy Parker

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: "In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but--" or "Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However--" and I think to myself: this is death. Lately it is all I can do to carry on such everyday conversations, because my cheek has developed a tendency to twitch of its own accord."
— Walker Percy (The Moviegoer)

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
— Albert Einstein

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
— E.B. White

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
— Mark Twain

"Life is rarely about what happened; it's mostly about what we think happened."
— Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto)

"I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love. "
— Dave Eggers (What Is the What)