"Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the concentration camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend."
— Gerda Weissmann Klein (All But My Life: A Memoir)

"It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"He said I could make him happy. Then I understood the cause of my sadness. I didn't want to make anybody happy. I wanted someone to make me happy. I knew that there was laughter and I wanted someone who could laugh with me. "
— Gerda Weissmann Klein (All But My Life: A Memoir)

"They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life. "
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"Whats ironic,” he adds, shaking his head, “is that everyone’s so busy trying not to look like they’re looking at you that they’re really not looking at you.”

“Wait. So what you’re saying…” I pause. “What you’re saying is…people aren’t really looking at me?” "
— K.L. Going (Fat Kid Rules the World)

" The story of my life can be told in silver: in chocolate mills, serving spoons, and services for twelve. The story of my life has nothing to do with me. The story of my life is things. Things that aren’t mine, that won’t ever be mine. It’s all I’ve ever known.

I wish it wasn’t.

"
— Elizabeth Scott (Stealing Heaven)

"We mutinied quietly, using every lesson we’d been taught by every person who’d ever used us for their own benefit."
— Laura Wiess (Leftovers)

"Tip: Unpopularity is a state of mind. Feel nerdy. Think uncool thoughts. It also helps to use the word “vaginal” a lot."
— Jennifer Ziegler (How Not to Be Popular)

"Family isn’t something that’s supposed to be static, or set. People marry in, divorce out. They’re born, they die. It’s always evolving, turning into something else."
— Sarah Dessen (Lock and Key)

"Things change. Stuff happens. Life goes on.

"
— Elizabeth Scott (Perfect You)

"In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty-two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)

". . .There are certain people who come into your life, and leave a mark. . . Their place in your heart is tender; a bruise of longing, a pulse of unfinished business. Just hearing their names pushes and pulls at you in a hundred ways, and when you try to define those hundred ways, describe them even to yourself, words are useless."
— Sara Zarr (Sweethearts)

"You forget all of it anyway. . . You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. . . You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else."
— Gabrielle Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac)

"Everybody told me to be a man. Nobody told me how."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Twisted)

"You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything."
— Jay Asher (Thirteen Reasons Why)

"‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That’s what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche or a blow job or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have a feeling that they can’t hide."
— Rachel Cohn (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)

"I came from a real tough neighborhood. In the library the sign says 'shut the fuck up!'"
— Rodney Dangerfield

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
— J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)

"There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library."
— Ray Bradbury

"Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go."
— Ray Bradbury

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches."
— Ray Bradbury

"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness."
— Ray Bradbury

"I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket."
— Ray Bradbury

"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?"
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."
— Ray Bradbury

"Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Books are flesh-and-blood ideas and cry out, silently, when put to the torch."
— Ray Bradbury

"Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill."
— Ray Bradbury

"You must write everyday of your life. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. May you be in love everyday for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

"We do need knowledge. . . Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book."
— Ray Bradbury

"Stuff your eyes with wonder . . . live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories"
— Ray Bradbury

"Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down."
— Ray Bradbury

"...I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
— Ray Bradbury

"The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain."
— Ray Bradbury

"The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little."
— Ray Bradbury

"Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. "
— Ray Bradbury

"For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals which to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Any book is a Good Book, and wherever they keep the Good Book safe is also the House a the Lord. "
— Kami Garcia (Beautiful Creatures)

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.