"When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning."
— Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions)

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

"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it."
— Terry Pratchett

"If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember."
— Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

"Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken."
— Terry Pratchett (Eric)

"Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
— Terry Pratchett (A Hat Full of Sky)

"To love would be an awfully big adventure."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything."
— Edith Wharton

"And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others."
— Ralph Ellison

"Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat."
— Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)

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

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"If you can't change your fate, change your attitude."
— Amy Tan

"Build a house?" exclaimed John.
"For the wendy," said Curly.
"For Wendy?" John said, aghast. "Why, she is only a girl!"
"That," explained Curly, "is why we are her servants."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word "darkness" on the walls of his cell."
— C.S. Lewis

"Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (The Tombs of Atuan)

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Diggers)

"His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.'"
— Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it."
— Terry Pratchett (Jingo)

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."
— Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

"I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting."
— Edith Wharton

"I will weep no more for the lost, asleep in their water graves."
— Stephen R. Lawhead (Taliesin)

"Laurence," Granby said at his shoulder, "in the hurry, the ammunition was all laid in its usual place on the left, though we are not carrying the bombs to balance it out; we ought to restow."

"Can you have it done before we engage? Oh, good Lord," Laurence said, realizing. "I do not even know the position of the convoy; do you?" Granby shook his head, embarrassed, and Laurence swallowed his pride and shouted, "Berkley, where are we going?"

A general explosion of mirth ran among the men on Maximus's back. Berkley called back, "Straight to Hell, ha ha!" More laughter, nearly drowning out the coordinates that he bellowed over."
— Naomi Novik (Throne of Jade)

"Happiness--a small-scale, endearing, harmonious happiness--surely dwelt here beneath the low-powered lamps in the tiny rooms of these houses. A small-scale happiness and a modest harmony: let a man cry out, let him rage, let him howl with grief with all the power of which he was capable, what more than these could he ever hope to gain in this life?"
— Fumiko Enchi (The Waiting Years)

"There are only three people in life you can never fool--pawnbrokers, whores, and your mother. Since your mother's dead, I've taken her place. Hence, I'm bullshit-proof."
— Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora)

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"‘“Some day, Locke Lamora,” he said, “some day, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope that I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh please,” said Locke, “it’ll never happen”."
— Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora)

"Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting."
— J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

"The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men. "
— Neil Gaiman (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)

"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

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)