"Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.


"
— Andrew Marvell

"If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

"When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made."
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."
— William Makepeace Thackeray

". . . Nature pulls one way and human nature another."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it. "
— Benjamin Disraeli

"So it goes."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
— Anaïs Nin

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
— Robert Frost

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

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."
— Novalis

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

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

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
— George Bernard Shaw