"My life has changed, and I'm changing with it."
— Sophie Kinsella (The Undomestic Goddess)

"All this time, I wasn't hungry for success, I was hungry."
— Sophie Kinsella (Remember Me?)

"If I behave as though this is a completely normal situation, then maybe it will be ..."
— Sophie Kinsella (Shopaholic Takes Manhattan)

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"I still believe in the Holy Trinity, except now it's Target, Trader Joe's, and IKEA."
— Jen Lancaster

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

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. "
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own, and Three Guineas)

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."
— Virginia Woolf

"I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee"
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Rules for Happiness:
something to do,
someone to love,
something to hope for."
— Immanuel Kant

"I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will protect upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."
— Carl Gustav Jung

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains,, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves."
— James Kavanaugh (There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves)

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"
— John Greenleaf Whittier (Maud Muller - Pamphlet)

"When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?"
— Virginia Woolf

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again."
— Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)

""And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.""
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)

"You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, It’s a wonder we do it at all. And yet... "
— Libba Bray

"And for a moment, I understand that I have friends on this lonely path; that sometimes your place is not something you find, but something you have when you need it."
— Libba Bray (Rebel Angels)

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
— Haruki Murakami

"The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?"
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come."
— Anita Shreve (Fortune's Rocks: A Novel)

"Why is love intensified by absence?"
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. Such is the strangeness of the human heart."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"I miss the way he used to kiss my shoulder whenever it was bare and he was nearby. I miss how he cleared his throat before he took a sip of water and scratched his left arm with his right hand when he was nervous. I miss how he tucked my hair behind my ear when it came loose and took my temperature when I was sick or when he was bored. I miss his glasses on my nightstand. I miss watching him take Sunday afternoon naps on my couch, with the newspaper resting on his stomach like a blanket. How his hands stayed clasped, fingers intertwined, while he slept. I miss the cadence of his speech and the stupidity of his puns. I miss playing doctor when we made love, and even when we didn't. I miss his smell, like fresh laundry and honey (because of his shampoo) at his place. Fresh laundry and coconut (because of my shampoo) at mine. I miss that he used to force me to listen to French rap and would sing along in a horrible accent. I miss that he always said "I love you" when he hung up the phone with his sister, never shy or embarassed, regardless of who else was around. I miss that his ideal Friday night included a DVD, eating Chinese food right out of the carton, and cuddling on top of my duvet cover. I miss that he reread books from his childhood and then from mine. I miss that he was the only man that I have ever farted on, and with, freely. I miss that he understood that the holidays were hard for me and that he wanted me to never feel lonely."
— Julie Buxbaum (The Opposite of Love)

""And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened." "
— Douglas Coupland

"When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

"It was one of those fine little love stories that can make you smile in your sleep at night."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century)

"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."
— Jodi Picoult (Handle with Care)

"Libraries aren't in the real world, after all. They're places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life."
— Paul Auster

"And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is."
— Paul Auster

"It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime..."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light."
— Jodi Picoult (Change of Heart)