"I don't know about you, but I'm kind of fed up with realism. After all, there's enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women. We should not rest until someone writes about a television show that features the Free People's World-Tree Library, with its elaborate waterfalls and Forbidden Books and Pirate-Magicians. We should be pining for a house haunted by rabbits."
— Kelly Link

"That which has quelled me, lives with me, Accomplice in catastrophe."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)

"I run down to meet Floriana who is breathless from her hike. She stops in the road, the last light at her back. Prickles of rain cling to her unkerchiefed, loosened hair, capturing in her the flickering russet frame of it. Topaz almonds are her eyes, lit tonight from some new, old place, from some exquisitely secret oubliette, which she must often forget she possesses. We talk for a minute and Barlozzo passes us by like a boy too shy to speak to two girls at once."
— Marlena De Blasi (A Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure)

"She was pulling a rope out of the water and knew it was coming to the end when the barnacles started to appear and they became more think and clustered. Then it was strangely peaceful and the sound was turned off. She stood at the bow of a ship. If only she could have stood this way above the water and really breathed and let the waves go by like pages being turned and watched everything more closely and chosen things more carefully then she might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it.

For a moment she felt an astonishing brilliance and heat and light and all of herself flared up and the vibration after sixty-five years was not weakened by time but more dense then suddenly it was as if the flame had caught the flimsiest piece of paper for it flickered up and flew into the air then quickly sank down withered into a thin cinder of ash which blew off, inconsequential. Her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide.

"
— Susan Minot (Evening)

"It occurred to him that seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story."
— John Crowley

"We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything."
— Charles de Lint

"Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake)

"What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just
crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which
is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “Ce n’étais pas moi!”
What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Oh, it's delightful to have ambitions. I'm so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them-- that's the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

"You're the strangest person I ever met, she said & I said you too & we decided we'd know each other a long time. "
— Brian Andreas

"I wish you could have been there for the sun & the rain & the long, hard hills. For the sound of a thousand conversations scattered along the road. For the people laughing & crying & remembering at the end. But, mainly, I wish you could have been there."
— Brian Andreas

""The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...

"We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
"And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.""
— Lorrie Moore

"'On-yez, where are you from, dear?' asked a black-slacked, frosted-haired woman whose skin was papery and melanomic with suntan. 'Originally.' She eyed Agnes's outfit as if it might be what in fact it was: a couple of blue things purchased in a department store in Cedar Rapids.

'Where am I from?' Agnes said it softly. 'Iowa.' She had a tendency not to speak up.

'Where?' the woman scowled, bewildered.

'Iowa,' Agnes repeated loudly.

The woman in black touched Agnes's wrist and leaned in confidentially. She moved her mouth in a concerned and exaggerated way, like an exercise. 'No, dear,' she said. 'Here we say O-hi-o.'
"
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with..."
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"We're all who we are endlessly."
— Marlena De Blasi (That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story)

"She's a woman. Like a chameleon does, a woman quietly blends into all the parts of her life. Sometimes you can hardly tell she's there, she's so quiet going on about her business. Feed the baby. Muck the stables. Make soup from stones. Make a sheet into a dress. She doesn't count on destiny for anything. She knows its her own hands, her own arms, her own thighs and breasts that have to do the work. Destiny is bigger in men's lives. Destiny is a welcome guest in a man's house. She barely knocks and he's there to open the door. "Yes, yes. You do it," he says to destiny and lumbers back to his chair."
— Marlena De Blasi (That Summer in Sicily: A Love Story)

"The light was grainy, dusty; it looked like the Milky Way had spread from the top of the sky all down the west, and the tented shapes of the mountains were huge and satin black against it, and the ridgeline trees made a filigree of onyx. The wind had increased but not cooled; the promise of full summer was in it. And when Dr. Barcroft turned from the west to look again at the house, he was hardly surprised to see that it had begun to turn like a wheel upon a vertical axle as the silhouettes of the dancers raced past window after window. It was as if their dancing, the female slide and shuffle, the masculine drum and thunder, propelled the house behind them; it had become a merry-go-round, turning steadily and stately as the music went just a little bit faster, just a little more, and he could tell there were furies in it, whirlwinds and cyclones and hurricanes that Quigley's fiddle barely held in check, that his calling could barely control. "
— Fred Chappell

"It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it."
— Terry Pratchett

"If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it."
— Stephen Colbert

"Here's how it works: the president
makes decisions. He's the decider.
The press secretary announces those
decisions, and you people of the press
type those decisions down. Make,
announce, type. Just put 'em through
a spell check and go home. The greatest
thing about this man is he's steady.
You know where he stands. He believes
the same thing Wednesday that he believed
on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.
Events can change; this man's beliefs never will."
— Stephen Colbert

"All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk."
— Lemony Snicket

"A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead."
— Lemony Snicket (The Slippery Slope)

"It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us."
— Ian McEwan (Black Dogs)

"There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable."
— Lynda Barry (What It Is)

"Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs."
— Marlena De Blasi (A Thousand Days in Venice)

"American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets."
— Sarah Vowell

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"Life itself is the proper binge."
— Julia Child

"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude."
— Julia Child

"His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile."
— Margaret Atwood

"The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
— Muriel Rukeyser

"Inside a barn is a whole universe, with its own time zone and climate and ecosystem, a shadowy world of swirling dust illuminated in tiger stripes by light shining through the cracks between the boards. Old leather tack, lengths of chain, rope, and baling twine dangled from nails and rafters and draped over stall railings. Generations of pocketknives lay lost in the layers of detritus on the floor."
— Carolyn Jourdan (Heart in the Right Place: A Memoir)