"Everything you can imagine is real."
— Pablo Picasso

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television."
— Woody Allen

"Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth."
— Pablo Picasso

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
— Albert Camus

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city."
— George Burns

"It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
— Haruki Murakami

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time."
— Haruki Murakami

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
— Haruki Murakami

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
— Haruki Murakami

"Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting."
— Haruki Murakami

"...I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Instead of things I'm good at, it might be faster to list the things I can't do. I can't cook or clean the house. My room's a mess, and I'm always losing things. I love music, but I can't sing a note. I'm clumsy and can barely sew a stitch. My sense of direction is the pits, and I can't tell left from right half the time. When I get angry, I tend to break things. Plates and pencils, alarm clocks. Later on I regret it, but at the time I can't help myself. I have no money in the bank. I'm bashful for no reason, and I have hardly any friends to speak of."
— Haruki Murakami

"Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment. Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories."
— Haruki Murakami

"Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering."
— Haruki Murakami

"I am a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy"
— J.D. Salinger

"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to."
— J.D. Salinger

"Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad."
— J.D. Salinger

"I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. "
— J.D. Salinger

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
— Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— Anaïs Nin

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
— Anaïs Nin

"Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are."
— Anaïs Nin

"I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ"
— Anaïs Nin

"if what proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then i will never know happiness. for i am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation."
— Anaïs Nin

"Love consists of not looking each other in the eye, but of looking outwardly in the same direction"
— Anaïs Nin

"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."
— Anaïs Nin

"I write emotional algebra."
— Anaïs Nin

"Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
— Sylvia Plath

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
— Sylvia Plath

"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
— Sylvia Plath

"How we need another soul to cling to."
— Sylvia Plath

"I hated men because they didn’t stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material. I made them propose and then showed them they hadn’t a chance. I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fun while a woman had birth pangs. They could gamble while a woman skimped on the butter on the bread. Men, nasty lousy men."
— Sylvia Plath

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
— Sylvia Plath