"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams."
— Dr. Seuss

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb...," He murmured.
"What a stupid lamb, " I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion."
— Stephenie Meyer

"She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place."
— Toni Morrison (Beloved)

"Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling —- I don't think it's any of that —- it's helpless ... it's absence of control —- and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that —- I have no use for it whatsoever."
— Toni Morrison

"I dream a dream that dreams back at me"
— Toni Morrison (A Mercy)

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights."
— Maya Angelou

"I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"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)

"There is always something left to love."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

"He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past"
— Gabriel García Márquez

"A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth."
— Gabriel García Márquez

"Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away, and he could not find it."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

"She felt the abyss of disenchantment."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)

"That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression…depression is pure dullness, tedium straight up. Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head and then going home and killing yourself…The word madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting-out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony...Remember that when you’re at the point at which you’re doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights. "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

"Why do anything-- why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"Doing nothing is opting for the sweetness of stillness...Instead of fighting with that which you cannot control, you might as well just see it through..."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Radical Sanity : Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women)

"If you are chronically down, it is a lifelong fight to keep from sinking "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

""When the light turns green, you go. When the light turns red, you stop. But what do you do when the light turns blue with orange and lavender spots?"
"
— Shel Silverstein

"Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again.

Peace. Was that the word?"
— Cornelia Funke (Inkdeath)

"Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles."
— Bob Dylan

"...but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons."
— Ayn Rand (Anthem)

"You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

". . . fear kills everything. Your mind, your heart, your imagination."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone."
— Cornelia Funke (Inkheart)

"But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it's how you spend your time on the way down that counts."
— Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: A Novel)

"Under the seams runs the pain."
— Anne Carson (Autobiography of Red)

"One day he said, "I'll tell this town
How it feels to be an unfunny clown."
And he told them all why he looked so sad,
And he told them all why he felt so bad.
He told of Pain and Rain and Cold,
He told of Darkness in his soul,
And after he finished his tale of woe,
Did everyone cry? Oh no, no, no,
They laughed until they shook the trees...
And while the world laughed outside.
Cloony the Clown sat down and cried."
— Shel Silverstein (A Light in the Attic)

"It wasn't raindrops at all. It was a great solid mass of water that might have been a lake or a whole ocean dropping out of the sky on top of them, and down it came, down and down and down, crashing first onto the seagulls and then onto the peach itself, while the poor travelers shrieked with fear and groped around frantically for something to catch hold of- the peach stem, the silk strings, anything they could find- and all the time the water came pouring and roaring down upon them, bouncing and smashing and sloshing and slashing and swashing and swirling and surging and whirling and gurgling and gushing and rushing and rushing, and it was like being pinned down underneath the biggest waterfall in the world and not being able to get out."
— Roald Dahl

""A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.""
— Roald Dahl

"Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well."
— Maya Angelou (Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now)

"I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. "
— Lorrie Moore (Anagrams)

"There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so."
— Mary Daly

"These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean."
— Lawrence Durrell (Justine)

"When I desire you a part of me is gone..."
— Anne Carson

"Perhaps she was not as weak as she always assumed; finally, you had to measure yourself by other people--there really was nothing else. Every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."
— Italo Calvino

"Beauty is a whore, I like money better."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)