"Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again."
— Myla Goldberg

"Unlike Rosa, I can see no divine purpose behind the tangle of this existence, no ordering hand. It is all a mystery, or more accurately, a mess. There are no heroes or villains, no saviors or demons or angels. Only those who have died and those of us who, for whatever reason, have survived. None of this will keep me from believing in God. I believe in Him, I just don't know that I will ever have faith in Him."
— Brady Udall

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
— Albert Einstein

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."
— Miss Piggy

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
— Margaret Mead

"...we accept the love we think we deserve."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
— Albert Einstein

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
— Douglas Adams

"You have to take risks, he said. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen. Every day, God gives us the sun--and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven't perceived that moment, that it doesn't exist--that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists--a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories."
— Paulo Coelho (By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)

"We laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away: right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"She was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"It was as if we'd only been gone the weekend. Or had we been gone a lifetime. Part of that was because when you've lived in Alaska, living in other places seems easier, less challenging, less threatening. Alaska had enlarged each of us. No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska."
— Peter Jenkins (Looking For Alaska)

"When shall I at last retire into solitude alone, without companions, without joy and without sorrow, with only the sacred certainty that all is a dream? When, in my rags—without desires—shall I retire contented into the mountains? When, seeing that my body is merely sickness and crime, age and death, shall I—free, fearless, and blissful—retire to the forest? When? When, oh when?"
— Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek)

"This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale."
— Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek)

"The only thing worse than feeling that you are going to die is the realization that you probably won't."
— Linda Greenlaw (All Fishermen Are Liars: True Adventures at Sea)

"It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more."
— Helen Fielding (Cause Celeb)

"Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."
— Ann Patchett (Bel Canto)

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven."
— Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

"He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?"
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Man is able, and has the duty, to reach the furthest point on the road he has chosen. Only by means of hope can we attain what is beyond hope."
— Nikos Kazantzakis (Report to Greco)

"All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows."
— Nikos Kazantzakis (Report to Greco)

"I said to the almond tree, 'Sister, speak to me of God.' And the almond tree blossomed."
— Nikos Kazantzakis (Report to Greco)

"I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads)."
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death-emotions that appear to have developed upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence. All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"If indeed [nature] has no greater aim than to provide a home for her greatest experiment, Man, it would be just like her methods to scatter a million stars wherof one might haply achieve her purpose."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"'Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"The real and proper question is: why is it beutiful?"
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance."
— Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

"Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega, it is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blinded note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing."
— Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Expeditions and Encounters)

"...life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength."
— Annie Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk, Expeditions and Encounters)

"There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

"Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)