"Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down."
— Oprah Winfrey

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."
— Paul Sweeney

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart"
— Helen Keller

"I was born to catch dragons in their dens / And pick flowers / To tell tales and laugh away the morning / To drift and dream like a lazy stream / And walk barefoot across sunshine days."
— James Kavanaugh (Sunshine Days and Foggy Nights)

"You're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
So... get on your way!"
— Dr. Seuss

"If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you."
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."
— Richard Bach

"Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
The Summer Day"
— Mary Oliver

"...there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save."
— Mary Oliver

"GOING TO WALDEN
It isn't very far as highways lie.
I might be back by nightfall, having seen
The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water.
Friends argue that I might be wiser for it.
They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:
How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!
Many have gone, and think me half a fool
To miss a day away in the cool country.
Maybe. But in a book I read and cherish,
Going to Walden is not so easy a thing
As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult
Trick of living, and finding it where you are."
— Mary Oliver

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."
— Mary Oliver

"'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.'"
— Margery Williams Bianco (The Velveteen Rabbit)

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll

""But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been. "
— Jimmy Buffett

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"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

"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple with a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves and satin sandles, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
and pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
"
— Jenny Joseph (Warning: When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple)

"My friends are gone and my hair is grey.
I ache in places I used to play.
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on.
I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song."
— Leonard Cohen (Dance Me to the End of Love)

"There will be a tomorrow that exists without me.
And I know that.
When that day arrives, I want this world to have seen greater beauty because I existed.
I want my life to have meant something.
I want this world to be brighter. I want this world to be happier.
I want people to have smiled more and to have laughed more because I've spent time here.
I want others to have seen and felt the uniqueness of my spirit.
And if I accomplish that, when my soul does move on and
my gift stays here and makes just one ripple;
I will look down and I will smile.
I will smile wide.
"
— Mike Litman (Conversations with Millionaires: What Millionaires Do to Get Rich, That You Never Learned About in School!)

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own."
— Arthur Conan Doyle

"What I know of the divine
science and holy scripture,
I learnt in the woods and fields.
"
— St. Bernard (Honey and Salt: Selected Spiritual Writings of Bernard of Clairvaux)

"And the Angels…were frozen in hard marble silence
and at a distance life awoke, and there was a rattle of lean wheels, a slow clangor of shod hoofs. And he heard the whistle wail along the river. Yet, as he stood for the last time by the Angels, he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet he does not say “The town is near,” but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring hills…..
"
— Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel)

"Take risks! That is really what life is about. We must pursue our own happiness. Nobody has ever lived our lives; ther are no guidelines. Trust your instincts. Accept nothing but the best. But then also look for it carefully. Don't allow it to slip between your fingers. Sometimes, good things come to us in a such a quiet fashion. And nothing comes complete. It is what we make of whatever we encounter that determines the outcome. What we choose to see, what we choose to save. And what we choose to remember. Never foget that all the love in your life is there, inside you, always."
— Linda Olsson (Astrid and Veronika)

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

"You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us."
— Robert Louis Stevenson

""Nature is God's first missionary. Where there is no Bible there are sparkling stars. Where there are not preachers there are spring times...
If a person has nothing but nature, then nature is enough to reveal something about God."
"
— Max Lucado

"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

"Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim."
— Nora Ephron

"It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book."
— Maureen Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books)

"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

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

"...you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance."
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"It's all in the view. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"It's just that...I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for awhile. Maybe even forever.
That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

""If you're anorexic, you're doing it wrong."

I swat him with a dish towel. "No, no, I mean anorexics look in the mirror, and even if they're eighty pounds, they still see a fat girl. I'm a hundred pounds heavier than I was in high school, my veins are full of creme fraiche, and yet I look in the mirror, take in the hair and makeup, and think, Damn, baby, you fiiine.""
— Jen Lancaster

""I'm not lazy. I'm simply judicious about excess movement.""
— Jen Lancaster (Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist's Quest to Discover if Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie is Not the Answer)

""Even when we're apart, we'll be looking at the same sky!""
— L.J. Smith (Daughters of Darkness)

"You don't love a girl because of beauty. You love her because she sings a song only you can understand."
— L.J. Smith (Secret Vampire)

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"I carry it all with me, in the quiet pools and strong currents of my being. I fill my hands with the black dirt left by the river's birth. I believe that what I hold in my hands is memory: like the river, it takes what it touches, carrying it along until all that remains is the bed over which the water flows."
— Kim Barnes (In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country)