"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed."
— Anne Rice

"Here you go on this long long dream. Don't even try to wake up. Just let it go on until it is over. You will learn many things. Just relax and observe because there is pain and that's it mostly and you aren't going to be able to escape no matter what. Eventually it will all be over anyway. Good luck."
— Francesca Lia Block

"Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like."
— Jane Austen

"After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue."
— Susanna Clarke