"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why we call it 'The Present'."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?"
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

""For he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost, as well in these times as in times of old as in times to come; wherefore, the course of the Lord is one eternal round" - 1 Nephi 10:19"
— Joseph Smith Jr. (The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ)

" Music isn't just a pleasure, a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief.

Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music?

How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message? "
— Orson Scott Card

"The big difference between my mom and me-- besides the fact that she is dead normal and I'm a magic-handling freak-- is that she's the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people's points of view, but she's honest about it. She's a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I'm a brass-bound bitch because I don't want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am. "
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."
- Andrew Wiggin"
— Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead)

"I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. "
— Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"They might not need me; but they might.
I'll let my head be just in sight;
A smile as small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity."
— Emily Dickinson

"The Guide says that there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
— Douglas Adams

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"You can only be young once. But you can always be immature"
— Dave Barry

"Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. "
— Dave Barry

"By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of this books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry..."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)

"When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching -- they are your family. "
— Jim Butcher

"Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face."
— Jim Butcher (Storm Front)

"Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.

Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - gradutaing, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expecations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.

And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realized that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's a part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another."
— Jim Butcher

"The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault."
— Jim Butcher (Blood Rites)

"An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo!"
— Jim Butcher (Blood Rites)

"Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar"
— Jim Butcher (Dead Beat)

"Love thy enemies, it says in the scriptures. My foster mother always added, "At the very least, you will be polite to them.""
— Patricia Briggs (Moon Called)

"A man's immortality can be found in his children."
— Patricia Briggs (Raven's Shadow)

"No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it."
— Elizabeth Peters

"The way to get on with a cat is to treat it as an equal - or even better, as the superior it knows itself to be."
— Elizabeth Peters

"The combination of physical strength and moral sincerity combined with tenderness of heart is exactly what is wanted in a husband.--Ameila Peabody"
— Elizabeth Peters

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it."
— Groucho Marx

"Personally, I say, "Out of the frying pan and into the deadly pit filled with sharks who are wielding chainsaws with killer kittens stapled to them." However, that one's having a rough time catching on."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones)

"I froze, shocked. (And don't try to clam that you did anything different the first time a government bureaucrat pulled a gun on you.)"
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)

"People can do great things. However, there are some things they just CAN'T do. I, for instance, have not been able to transform myself into a Posicle, despite years of effort."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)

"Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics "
— Barry Hughart (Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was)

"There are any number of magical creatures, mostly female, whose singing can bring about horror and death. Sirens, undines, banshees, Bananarama tribute bands..."
— Simon R. Green

"We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn."
— Frank Herbert (Dune)

"The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing."
— Frank Herbert (Dune)

"Guilt starts as a feeling of failure."
— Frank Herbert

"You see, that is the sad, sorry, terrible thing about sarcasm.

It's really funny."
— Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians)