"Because I am an inhuman monster, I tend to be logical,..."
— Jeff Lindsay

""Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.""
— Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark)

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
— Haruki Murakami

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
— Salman Rushdie

"To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?"
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. "
— Salman Rushdie

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses: A Novel)

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"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

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

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
— Abraham Lincoln

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"Women are like teabags; you never know how strong they are until they're put in hot water."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
— John Lennon

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"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

"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)

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.

The problem’s name is God."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behing-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Otto Cone as a man of seventy-plus years jumped into an open lift shaft and died. Now this was a subject which Alicia Cone, who would readily discuss the most taboo matters refused to touch upon. Why does a survivor of the camps live forty years then complete the job the monsters didn't get done? Does great evil eventually triumph no matter how strenuously it is resisted? Does it leave a sliver of ice in the blood working its way through until it reaches the heart? Or worse, can a man's death be incompatible with his life? Alicia, who's first response on hearing of her father's death had been fury, flung such questions as these at her mother, who stone-faced beneath a broad-brimmed black hat said only, "You have inherited his lack of restraint my dear."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"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

"Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses: A Novel)

"I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)