"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."
— William Faulkner (Light in August)

"Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. "
— William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)

"“You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.” --Colonel Korn, Catch-22 "
— Joseph Heller

"If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"I think... if it is true that
there are as many minds as there
are heads, then there are as many
kinds of love as there are hearts."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"If you want to be happy, you have to believe in the possibility of happiness...Let the dead bury the dead, but while ever there is life,you must live and be happy."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Yes, love, ...but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one's neighbours; to love one's enemies. To love everything - to Love God in all His manifestations. Some one dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? ...Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her.... If it were only possible for me to see her once more... once, looking into those eyes to say..."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before..."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields."
— Leo Tolstoy

"He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Life did not stop, and one had to live."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. "
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side! "
— Leo Tolstoy

"For if we allow that human life is always guided by reason, we destroy the premise that life is possible at all."
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty."
— Leo Tolstoy

""It would be good," thought Prince Andrei, glancing at the little image that his sister had hung around his neck with such reverence and emotion, "It would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to Princess Marya . How good it would be to know where to seek help in this life, and what to expect after it, beyond the grave! How happy and at peace I should be if I could now say:" Lord have mercy on me!... But to whom should I say this? To some power--- indefinable and incomprehensible, to which I not only cannot appeal, but which I cannot express in words---The Great All or Nothing," he said to himself, "or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Marya? There is nothing certain, nothing except the nothingness of everything that is comprehensible to me, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all important!""
— Leo Tolstoy

"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved -- loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
— Victor Hugo

"To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it."
— Kevin Brockmeier (The Brief History of the Dead)