"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another."
— Lemony Snicket

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.....the sum of all human wisdom will be contained in these two words: Wait and Hope."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"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)

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings."
— Anaïs Nin

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books"
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."
— Zelda Fitzgerald

"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"Let me die the moment my love dies.

Let me not outlive my own capacity to love.

Let me die still loving, and so, never die. "
— Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses: A Play)

""So sweet and delicious do I become,
when I am in bed with a man
who, I sense, loves and enjoys me,
that the pleasure I bring excels all delight,
so the knot of love, however tight
it seemed before, is tied tighter still.""
— Veronica Franco (Poems and Selected Letters)

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

"When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuosly until death do them part"
— George Bernard Shaw

"I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. "
— Garrison Keillor

"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony."
— Douglas Coupland (Shampoo Planet)

"Life will not break your heart. It'll crush it."
— Henry Rollins

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself."
— Harvey S. Firestone

"to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again."
— Ellen Bass

"The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back."
— Abigail Van Buren

"...but better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"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

"We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change."
— Katharine Hepburn (Me: Stories of My Life)