"A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of someone who had searched for the leak in life's gas pipe with a lighted candle."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"There was something sort of bleak about her tone, rather as if she had swallowed an east wind. This I took to be due to the fact that she probably hadn't breakfasted. It's only after a bit of breakfast that I'm able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a fellow the universal favourite. I'm never much of a lad till I've engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee.

"I suppose you haven't breakfasted?"

"I have not yet breakfasted."

"Won't you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?"

"No, thank you."

She spoke as if she belonged to an anti-sausage league or a league for the suppression of eggs. There was a bit of silence."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Sturgis had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy it to the full. It was about an acquaintance of his who had kept rabbits, and it suffered in lucidity from his unfortunate habit of pronouncing rabbits 'roberts', combined with the fact that by a singular coincidence the acquaintance had been a Mr. Roberts. Roberts, it seemed, had been deeply attached to roberts. In fact, his practice of keeping roberts in his bedroom had led to trouble with Mrs. Roberts, and in the end Mrs. Roberts had drowned the roberts in the pond and Roberts, who thought the world of his roberts and not quite so highly of Mrs. Roberts, had never forgiven her."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"

"The mood will pass, sir."
— P.G. Wodehouse (The Code of the Woosters)

"I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me.
But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind."
— Stephen Fry

"I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way."
— Stephen Fry

""Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.""
— David Foster Wallace

"...in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight -- 'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore' -- which evidently makes me look either as if I'm very rude and abrupt or as if I'm semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully...I've actually lost friends this way."
— David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays)

""Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier")."
— David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest: A Novel)

"What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant."
— David Foster Wallace (Oblivion: Stories)

"She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night."
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

"Interviewer:
What surprises you in life?

Nabokov:
...the marvel of consciousness- that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being."
— epigraph to Brian Boyd's "Nabokov: The Russian Years"

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.)

"Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security. "
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields."
— Truman Capote

"Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror."
— Truman Capote

"A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird."
— Truman Capote

"There were hints of sunrise on the rim of the sky, yet it was still dark, and the traces of morning color were like goldfish swimming in ink."
— Truman Capote (The Muses Are Heard)

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."
— Truman Capote

"..It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill."
— Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders)

"Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing.
And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can
make someone smile while they're having a piss."
— Banksy (Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall)

"The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative, young people, leaving us only with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in human history has so much been used by so many to say so little."
— Banksy

"Life has more imagination than we do."
— François Truffaut

""The only unbearble thing is that nothing is unbearable.""
— Arthur Rimbaud

"A thousand Dreams within me softly burn"
— Arthur Rimbaud

"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters."
— Charles Baudelaire

"There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"When it comes to letting the world in on the secrets of his heart, he has about as much shrinking reticence as a steam calliope."
— P.G. Wodehouse

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"I felt it shelter to speak to you."
— Emily Dickinson

"Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart."
— Louise Bogan

"His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome."
— Joseph Conrad

"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."
— Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness)

"It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made names for them new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lorien there was no stain."
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth."
— Henry Miller

"As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. "
— Leonard Cohen (The Favorite Game)

"Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."
— Albert Camus

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery."
— Anaïs Nin

"Wonder. Go on and wonder."
— William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

"But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue."
— Pablo Neruda

"I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...""
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 7: Brief Lives)

"Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own idea about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be Mad Scientists."
— Warren Ellis