"By Aladdin's lamplit scrotum, man! Everything is a story. What is there but stories? Stories are the only truth."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."
— Dr. Seuss

"It was watching Madeline Alby eat cheese with every ounce of her being, like it was the first and best time, that made him realize that he had never really tasted cheese, or crackers, or life. And he didn't want his daughter to live that way. He'd moved her into her own room the night before...He hadn't slept well, and had gotten up five times during the night to check on her, only to find her sleeping peacefully, but he could lose a little sleep if Sophie could go through life without his fears and limitations. He wanted her to experience all the glorious cheese of life."
— Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job)

"When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth."
— Jodi Picoult (Handle with Care)

""You see," I explained to Joshua, "what Joy is doing is ironic, yet that's not her intent. That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm."
"No kidding?" said Josh.
"Why do I waste my time with you?""
— Christopher Moore (Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal)

"For a while he'd tried molding himself into the tragic Romantic hero, brooding and staring clench-jawed off into space as he composed dark verse in his head. But it turned out that trying to appear tragic in Incontinence, Indiana, was redundant, and his mother kept shouting at him and making him forget his rhymes. "Tommy, if you keep grinding your teeth like that, they'll wear away and you'll have to have dentures like Aunt Ester." Tommy only wished his beard was as heavy as Aunt Ester's---then he could stare out over the moors while he stroked it pensively."
— Christopher Moore (You Suck: A Love Story)

"...quoting reminds me there are other people in the world besides only me. And other thoughts besides mine, and other ways of thinking."
— Gregory Maguire (What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy)

"'You are not at all like my rose,' he said. 'As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.'

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

'You are beautiful, but you are empty,' he went on. 'One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.'"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind."
— Jeffrey Eugenides