"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."
— Anaïs Nin

"You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
"
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. "
— Plato

"The Red Poppy

The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they
govern me. I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered."
— Louise Glück

"We are each the love of someone's life."
— Andrew Sean Greer

"I am sure we both loved a different man. Because a lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we’ve married him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled in by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. "
— Andrew Sean Greer

"Love is like breathing, you take it in and let it out."
— Wally Lamb (She's Come Undone)