"beware of ideas..."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. "
— James Joyce

"Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied."
— Octavio Paz

"conflict is the axis upon which the tao revolves..."
— Phillip

"'You men,' she says. 'You durn men.'"
— William Faulkner

"The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
— Dorothy Parker

"Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke."
— Lynda Barry

"Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing."
— William S. Burroughs

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"They're in love. Fuck the war."
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance."
— Thomas Pynchon (Slow Learner: Early Stories Tag: With an introduction by the author)

"…though it is not often that death is so clearly told to fuck off."
— Thomas Pynchon

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
— James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"...and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Radical simply means "grasping things at the root."
"
— Angela Davis

"What can we learn from women like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday that we may not be able to learn from Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary Church Terrell? If we were beginning to appreciate the blasphemies of fictionalized blues women - especially their outrageous politics of sexuality - and the knowledge that might be gleaned from their lives about the possibilities of transforming gender relations within black communities, perhaps we also could benefit from a look at the artistic contributions of the original blues women."
— Angela Y. Davis

"What is hell? I still maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)