"I am very happy
Because I have conquered myself
And not the world.
I am very happy
Because I have loved the world
And not myself."
— Sri Chinmoy

"But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)

"I felt tired for the first time, and I thought of us lying down on some grassy patch of SeaWorld together, me on my back and she on her side with her arm draped against me, her head on my shoulder, facing me. Not doing anything--just lying there together beneath the sky, the night here so well lit that it drowns out the stars. And maybe I could feel her breathe against my neck, and maybe we could just stay there until morning and then the people would walk past us as they came into the park, and they would see us and think that we were tourists, too, and we could just disappear into them."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"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

"That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world."
— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I used to think that humour was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is .... But now I think its the opposite. Humour is a way of shrinking from the wonderful and terrible world."
— Jonathan Safron Foer

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"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

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
— Bertrand Russell

"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."
— Robert Frost

"try and expect nothing,
but be OPEN for anything.
Don't look far for happiness,
but never settle for anything less.
"
— C. S

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words."
— Donna Roberts

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"I fall asleep with my friends around me, the only place i know. I'm going to call this home."
— Jimmy Eat World

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
— Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems)

"You only live twice:
Once when you're born
And once when you look death in the face."
— Ian Fleming (You Only Live Twice)

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain."
— Bob Marley

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
— Arthur O'Shaughnessy (Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy)

"If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet."
— Keith Richards (Keith Richards: In His Own Words)

"the past is only the future with the lights on."
— Mark Hoppus ("Blink 182")

"Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays."
— Oscar Wilde

"Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you.
I'd been broken beyond repair."
— Stephenie Meyer (New Moon)

"A book without words is like love without a kiss; it's empty."
— Andrew Wolfe

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

"Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up."
— James Baldwin

"Just because you're beautiful and perfect, it's made you conceited."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Wherever you will go,
I will let you down,
But this lullaby goes on. "
— Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You)

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first."
— Jim Morrison

"Beauty is a whore, I like money better."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
— Albert Einstein

"Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere."
— Albert Einstein

"The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits."
— Albert Einstein

"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it."
— Albert Einstein

"She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on."
— Kate Atkinson (Case Histories: A Novel)

"She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth."
— Albert Camus

"As i thought about all that surgar running through her veins, i imagined it as a kind of liquid candy. But when i asked her if it tasted sweet, she laughed quietly and said no. It stung, she said. But she needed it. She had to have it. All i could imagine was that candied water burning inside my mother. Like an invisible fire that i could not see or taste or touch or stop."
— Christine Walde

"Sometimes she has imagined what it would be like to fly, to live in the river, to run like a horse. She has dreamed of that freedom, that power, and fears the wildness in herself that wants to live as beasts live, moved purely by need and desire. She has felt torn between the heat of her limbs and the thoughts in her mind telling her to be careful and good and always calm.
Don't scream or cry, don't run to him and throw yourself at his feet, pleading for him to take you in his arms, don't strip off your clothes and run naked to the water, wild with wanting."
— Francesca Lia Block