"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)

"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed."
— Anne Rice

"Reality continues to ruin my life."
— Bill Watterson (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes)

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died young.

- Lestat de Lioncourt"
— Anne Rice

"To love would be an awfully big adventure."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."
— Anne Frank

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

"The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead."
— Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat)

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

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
— Mark Twain

"I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew."
— Anne Rice (The Queen of the Damned)

"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

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

""I will be the Vampire Lestat for all to see. A symbol, a freak of nature - something loved, something despised all of those things. I tell you I can't give it up. I can't miss. And quite frankly I am not in the least afraid."

- Lestat, The Vampire Lestat, p. 532
"
— Anne Rice

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

""To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost."
"So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions."
"An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.""
— Anne Rice (The Vampire Lestat)

"Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult."
— Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire)

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

"In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?"
— Anne Rice

"The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us."
— Anne Rice (Interview With The Vampire)

"Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, everyone of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it's life quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - evetually, astoundingly, and all to briefly- in you."
— Bill Bryson

"Take me from this earth
an endless night-
this, the end of life.
From the dark I feel your lips
and taste your bloody kiss.
"
— Anne Rice (Interview With The Vampire)

"I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. "
— W.C. Fields

"Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!"
— Anne Rice (The Queen of the Damned)

"Keep your secrets
Keep your silence
It is a better gift than truth"
— Anne Rice (The Queen of the Damned)

"He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."
— Douglas Adams

"Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt"
— Anne Rice

"How shameful. How predictable! How insipid. And how sweet."
— Anne Rice

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
— Douglas Adams

"To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself."
— Anne Rice

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc...and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
— Douglas Adams

"To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner"
— Anne Rice

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before."
— Anne Rice (Pandora)

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
— Douglas Adams

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"The Guide says that there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
— Douglas Adams

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
— Douglas Adams

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own set of laws."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"If I ever meet myself, I'll hit myself so hard I won't know what's hit me."
— Douglas Adams

""You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen.""
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs--people who don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin "Dear Sire," and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us."
— Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)

"Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms."
— Bill Bryson