"It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction."
— Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."
— Dorothy Parker

"I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host."
— Dorothy Parker

"Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt."
— Dorothy Parker

"The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue."
— Dorothy Parker

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

"An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know.

All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . ."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street."
— Virginia Woolf

"...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction... "
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

"She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

"What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one."
— Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
— E.M. Forster

"At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselssly into the past."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"There must have been moments even that afternoon whe Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)

"His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

"The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden: Or, Life in the Woods)

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
— Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience and Other Essays: Collected Essays of Henry David Thoreau)

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
— Henry David Thoreau

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something."
— Henry David Thoreau

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The earth laughs in flowers."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The only way to have a friend is to be one."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live."
— Dorothy Parker

"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea"
— Isak Dinesen

"God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.

"
— Isak Dinesen

"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
— Isak Dinesen

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"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

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
— John Lennon

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
— Oscar Wilde