"“I am afraid to show you who I really am, because if I show you who I really am, you might not like it--and that's all I got.”"
— Sabrina Ward Harrison (Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself)

"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."
— Zelda Fitzgerald

"The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it. You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. Crying gives me a headache."
— Marjorie Pay Hinckley

"What would come, would come...and you would have to meet it,when it did."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)

"I wish for a moment that time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say "I'm sorry" until it is as meaningless air."
— Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)

"If there was an abundance of misery in the world, there was also sufficient joy, yes - as long as one knew where to look for it."
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. I'll always be with you."
— A.A. Milne

"Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known."
— A.A. Milne

"Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
— A.A. Milne

"'Sometimes,' said Pooh, 'the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.'"
— A.A. Milne

"If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you."
— A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

"'After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.'"
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

"...you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance."
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

"'Hahnji, mister, you must be patient. Before you can name that corner, our future must become past.'"
— Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance)

"As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master..."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."
— Anonymous (The Bhagavad Gita)

"Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend."
— Elizabeth Gilbert

"Look for God. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone…that’s how the light of God gets in."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices."
— Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia)

"...behind the mask of ice that people wear, there beats a heart of fire."
— Paulo Coelho (Warrior of the Light: A Manual)

"Try to find pleasure in the speed that you're not used to. Changing the way you do routine things allows a new person to grow inside of you. But when all is said and done, you're the one who must decide how you handle it."
— Paulo Coelho

"When someone leaves, it's because someone else is about to arrive."
— Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)

"We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves."
— Tom Robbins

"So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free."
— Tom Robbins

"Even if someone wasn't perfect or even especially good, you couldn't dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously."
— Hunter S. Thompson

"You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"People were always getting ready for tomorrow.
I didnt believe in that.
Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.
It didnt even know they were there."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"…if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us."
— Richard Yates (Eleven Kinds of Loneliness)

"Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."
— Malcolm X

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"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

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche