"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
— James Joyce

"All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday."
— James Joyce

"The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. "
— James Joyce

"The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Let us leave theories there and return to here's hear."
— James Joyce (Finnegans Wake)

"if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---"
— Emily Dickinson

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these."
— Emily Dickinson

"I felt it shelter to speak to you."
— Emily Dickinson

"I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear."
— George Eliot

"A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away."
— George Eliot

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."
— Roland Barthes

"My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them."
— 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

"[...] 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)

"The only truth is music"
— Jack Kerouac

"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)

"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)

"I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling."
— Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)

"We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time."
— Jack Kerouac

"Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry."
— Jack Kerouac

"For darkness restores what light cannot repair."
— Joseph Brodsky

"When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. It is your window on time's infinity. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open."
— Joseph Brodsky

"Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks."
— Walter Benjamin (Illuminations: Essays and Reflections)

"In other words, the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty."
— Walter Benjamin

"The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

"The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (Cancer Ward)

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
— Franz Kafka

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
— Franz Kafka

"All language is but a poor translation."
— Franz Kafka

"Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."
— Joan Didion

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."
— Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays)

"Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
— Carl Sagan

"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."
— Carl Sagan

"I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way."
— Carl Sagan

"we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers"
— Carl Sagan

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. "
— Carl Sagan

"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion."
— Carl Sagan

"We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."
— Carl Sagan

"I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble."
— Don DeLillo (Valparaiso)

"Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets. "
— Don DeLillo (The Day Room)

"Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others."
— Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis)

"Explain me to myself, you’ll make me choke on my lunch. Feel sympathy for me, I’ll puke monkey blood on your understated shoes."
— Don DeLillo (Valparaiso)

"Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover. "
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)