"Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"The mind has an ear of its own and sometimes memory is the fiercest fucking DJ alive. "
— Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

"Without love and a dream it would never come true..."
— Grateful Dead

"Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
— Laozi

"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"
— Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are)

"Say anything about me, darling, as long as it isn't boring."
— Tallulah Bankhead

"Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... now you tell me what you know. "
— Groucho Marx

"Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance"
— Dave Barry

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
— Mark Twain

"A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation."
— Mark Twain

"My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it."
— Jasper Johns

"You are -- your life, and nothing else."
— Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit: A Play in One Act)

"I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Timequake)

"I am not a person and I am not an animal. There is something I am here for something I must do before I can go."
— William S. Burroughs (The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead)

"God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the
sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look
around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly
couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to
think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and
look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle)

"People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

""A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."

ugh, i'm not sure if this makes me feel guilty for all the books i've never finished or hopeful. "
— David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
— Oscar Wilde

"WE JUST DID AN AWESOME JOB OF NOT DYING"
— John Green (Let It Snow: Three Holiday Stories)

"I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way."
— Mark Twain

"Poetry is what happens when nothing else can."
— Charles Bukowski

"what kind of fuckery is this?"
— Amy Winehouse

"Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
— Oscar Wilde

"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."
— Emily Post

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Road to Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey)

"He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream, too."
— Lewis Carroll

"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth."
— Albert Einstein

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances..."
— Viktor E. Frankl

"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."
— Anaïs Nin (Henry and June)

"once in awhile you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look it right"
— Jerry Garcia

"You can't. You just have to."
— William Faulkner

"I try to make everyone's day a little more surreal."
— Bill Watterson (The Essential Calvin and Hobbes)

"If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong."
— Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian)

"Nice dress. Take it off."
— Janet Evanovich

"Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing."
— Charles Bukowski

"History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices."
— Bill Watterson (Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat)

"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. "
— Robert Fripp

"Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words."
— George Eliot

"A friend is a gift you give yourself."
— Robert Louis Stevenson

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means."
— William Faulkner

"Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn't suck."
— Joss Whedon

"There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words."
— Dorothy Parker

"How do people, like, not curse? How is that possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, 'And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers.' How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies. "
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
— Anaïs Nin

"I never change, I simply become more myself."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
— Anaïs Nin

"At the Day of Judgement we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done."
— Thomas à Kempis