""Well, do you do that consciously?" Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud.
"Do what?" Cloud said. "Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't -- take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment -- never see a trade is possible.""
— John Crowley (Little, Big)

"The further in you go, the bigger it gets."
— John Crowley (Little, Big)

"After many trials the God and his love end happily—tho' not all remember this conclusion—which is less memorable than the moment when everything was lost. Happy endings are all alike; disasters may be unique."
— John Crowley (Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land)

"If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down."
— Ray Bradbury

"You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

"The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They're Caeser's praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, "Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal." Most of us can't rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library."
— Ray Bradbury

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."
— Ray Bradbury

"What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?"
— Ray Bradbury

"A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know."
— Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)

"Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness."
— Ray Bradbury

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Reality is not always probable, or likely."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"The original is unfaithful to the translation."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than 5 million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, "what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal," they are, in fact, working very, very hard."
— Kate Atkinson

"Fairy tales, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Just going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
— G.K. Chesterton (Alarms and Discursions)

"I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else."
— G.K. Chesterton

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people."
— G.K. Chesterton

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
— G.K. Chesterton

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist."
— G.K. Chesterton

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."
— G.K. Chesterton

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see."
— G.K. Chesterton

"When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws."
— G.K. Chesterton

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle."
— G.K. Chesterton

"A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition."
— G.K. Chesterton

"In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness."
— G.K. Chesterton

"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue."
— G.K. Chesterton

"anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result"
— Yukio Mishima (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion)