"The compelling thing about making art - or making anything, I suppose - is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"Right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness, dead people need us to rememer them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say “I am sorry”, until its as meaningless as air."
— Audrey Niffenegger

"You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)

"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

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

"The only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor: A Novel)

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention.
Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.
This is all practice."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?"
— Chuck Palahniuk

"No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

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

"I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

"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)

"Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"...hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Give me lust, baby.

Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existentialist ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"Your heart is my piñata."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Just for the record, the weather today is bitter with occasional fits of jealous rage."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)

"When you understand," Brandy says, "that what you're telling is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan," Brandy says, "then we'll figure out who you're going to be."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"No, whether a woman is a concubine to fuck or a damsel to redeem, she's always just some passive object to fulfill a man's purpose."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Snuff)

""When you think about it, Johnny Appleseed was a fucking ecological terrorist""
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Listen, now, you're going to die, Ray-mond K. K. K. Hessel, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. So lie to me. Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up. I don't give a shit. I have a gun.

Finally, you were listening and coming out of the little tragedy in your head.

Fill in the blank. What does Raymond Hessel want to be when he grows up?

Go home, you said you just wanted to go home, please.

No shit, I said. But after that, how did you want to spend your life? If you could do anything in the world.

Make something up.

You didn't know.

Then you're dead right now, I said. I said, now turn your head.

Death to commence in ten, in nine, in eight.

A vet, you said. You want to be a vet, a veterinarian.

You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose. I stuffed your wallet into the back of your jeans. So you really wanted to be an animal doctor. I took the saltwater muzzle of the gun off one cheek and pressed it against another. Is that what you've always wanted to be, Dr. Raymond K. K. K. K. Hessel, a veterinarian?...

So, I said, go back to school. If you wake up tomorrow morning, you find a way to get back into school.

I have your license.

I know who you are. I know where you live. I'm keeping your license, and I'm going to check on you, mister Raymond K. Hessel. In three months, and then six months, and then a year, and if you aren't back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead...

Raymond K. K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you've ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your life."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

"People have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

"A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (Cancer Ward)

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

"A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried."
— Billy Collins

"All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means."
— Billy Collins

"...the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry...
"
— Billy Collins (The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems)

"life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye."
— Billy Collins

"the greatest Americans
have not been born yet
they are waiting patiently
for the past to die"
— Saul Williams

"Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding"
— Saul Williams (Said the Shotgun to the Head)

"she kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sun"
— Saul Williams (Said the Shotgun to the Head)

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way."
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"Te amo como se aman ciertas cosa oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.
(I love you as certain darks things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)"
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets/Cien Sonetos De Amor)

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
— Pablo Neruda (Love: Ten Poems By Pablo Neruda)

"Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life"
— Pablo Neruda

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

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

"Being crazy isn't enough."
— Dr. Seuss

"My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I'm told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but its silver when its wet, and all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet."
— Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

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

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
— Miss Piggy

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
— Elbert Hubbard

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)