"My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing."
— Osip Mandelstam (Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam)

"This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself."
— Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)

"The voice of the sea speaks to the soul."
— Kate Chopin (The Awakening)

"I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"He's like a lake. You assume it has great depths, pure undisturbed undiscoverable depths. You assume depths must be there because the surface is so flat--pretty and flat and utterly unrevealing. Boring almost, you might say, if you didn't know about the depths, that is, if you didn't believe they were there."
— Melanie Thernstrom (Dead Girl)

"One of the first things we have to let go of is not being able to let go of anybody."
— Merrit Malloy (The People Who Didn't Say Goodbye)

"If I could, I'd dave whiffs of beautiful nights in a little pouch on my chest, the way the indians keep the scents of the prairie."
— Iva Perkarkova (Truck Stop Rainbows)

"Do not allow yourself to be buried
In the howling Of what might have been."
— Sharon M. Van Sluys

"To remember is not always to go back to what used to be."
— Julia Uceda

"A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her."
— John Berger (Ways of Seeing)

"I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep--leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can."
— Beryl Markham (West with the Night)

"I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it...why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer."
— Anna Quindlen (One True Thing: A Novel)

"When I am lonely for boys it's their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes . . . the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual; that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don't move, I think. Stay like that. Let me have that. What power they have over me is held through the eyes. . . ."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Be courageous when the mind deceives you
Be courageous
In the final account only this is important"
— Zbigniew Herbert

"Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will."
— Mary Stewart (The Hollow Hills)

"One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your hear that every day is the best day of the year."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Not because of me, not because of you, just that the summer, embracing both of us together, put me so close to you there could be no escape."
— Natalya Gorbanevskaya

"Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body."
— Stephen Dunn (New & Selected Poems 1974-1994)

"I am a woman and must not trudge after him."
— Ellen Cassedy

"I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else."
— Virginia Woolf

"She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girliness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words 'time management' out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down the unchartered beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell."
— Rebecca Wells (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood)

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you until it seems that you cannot hold on for a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time when the tide will turn."
— Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Let me listen to me and not to them."
— Gertrude Stein

"She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it."
— Alice Walker

"This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept yourself, claim it again--your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It's all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it back. Take it back."
— Jean Hegland (Into the Forest)

"I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"I carry the landscape inside me like an ache. The story of who I am cannot be severed from the story of the flatwoods."
— Janisse Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood)

"The changes we dread most may contain our salvation."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder: Essays)

"Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend."
— Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)

"The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections."
— Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace)

"We do know that no one gets wise enough to understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try."
— Louise Erdrich (The Bingo Palace)

"Missing rubs the soul raw."
— Sarah Dunant (Mapping the Edge)

"Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours."
— Henry James

"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."
— Edward Abbey

"I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"Every human being, he believed, must do one of three basic things during his lifetime: leave something living, create something lovely, or make something better."
— Renee Manfredi (Above the Thunder)

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."
— Joseph Campbell

"We were opposites in every way until we grew up, left home, and discovered we were more alike than we'd thought. Sisters only get to be opposites within the family; separated by the world, they become practically identical."
— Helen Fremont (After Long Silence)

"Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be."
— Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)

"This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . ."
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"[T]here is nothing worse than doing what you don't want to do, day after day, to little renummeration or applause. It's the death of your soul."
— Adam Davies (The Frog King)

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
— Mark Twain

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
— Anaïs Nin

"Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable."
— Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall On Your Knees)

"Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain."
— Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall On Your Knees)

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fuly formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive. I understand this. Nonetheless, I sometimes find it hard to bear."
— Bernhard Schlink

"She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)