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

"Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake)

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."
— Zora Neale Hurston

"I would assign every lie a color: yellow when they were innocent, pale blue when they sailed over you like the sky, red because I knew they drew blood. And then there was the black lie. That's the worst of all. A black lie was when I told you the truth. "
— Steve Martin

"Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart."
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"‘Name the different kinds of people,’ said Miss Lupescu. ‘Now.’

Bod thought for a moment. ‘The living,’ he said. ‘Er. The dead.’ He stopped. Then, ‘...Cats?’ he offered, uncertainly."
— Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book)

"I don't suffer from insanity. I can actually say that I enjoy it."
— Tim Dorsey

"Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?"
— Neil Gaiman

"Roosevelt spoke eloquently, in his penetrating tenor, of those 'who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life . . . I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,' he told the audience, '. . . The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
— Susan Quinn (Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times)

"Marriage, in my view, should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries."
— Elizabeth Peters (The Mummy Case)