"We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems."
— Arthur O'Shaughnessy (Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy)

"Heart and head are contrary historians."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Every name is real. That's the nature of names."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Home is everything you can walk to."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing" I walked in a gray world of nothing."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.

"
— Jerry Spinelli

""Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckle ball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down - not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing.""
— Jerry Spinelli

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

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way to make life more bearable."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all."
— Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan)

"In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
— Kurt Vonnegut