"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude."
— Henry David Thoreau

"I was not designed to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest."
— Henry David Thoreau (On the Duty of Civil Disobedience)

"Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau

"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. "
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"The things you own end up owning you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"This is your life and its ending one moment at a time."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"Today is the sort of day where the sun only comes up to humiliate you."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
Well, sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"More and more, it feels like I'm doing a really bad impersonation of myself."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia / Choke)

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"I say let me never be complete, I say may I never be content,I say deliver me from Swedish furniture, I say deliver me from clever arts, I say deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth,I say you have to give up! I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may!"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"One a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"We just had a near-life experience!"
— Chuck Palahniuk

"I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect"
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice."
— Fernando Pessoa

"To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet."
— Fernando Pessoa (Libro del desasosiego)

"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps."
— Fernando Pessoa

"Every gesture is a revolutionary act. "
— Fernando Pessoa

"To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life."
— Fernando Pessoa

"My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.

From, The Book of Disquiet



"
— Fernando Pessoa

"What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?"
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live."
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

From, The Book of Disquiet
"
— Fernando Pessoa

"I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self- absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.

"
— Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

"A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die."
— Franz Kafka

"I am free and that is why I am lost."
— Franz Kafka

"Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life."
— Franz Kafka

"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself."
— Franz Kafka

"I am in chains. Don't touch my chains."
— Franz Kafka

"I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy."
— Franz Kafka

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."
— Franz Kafka

"The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things."
— Franz Kafka