""Nowhere in the english language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' exist""
— Douglas Adams

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
— Albert Einstein

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."
— James Joyce

"I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women."
— James Joyce (Selected Letters)

"...and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood."
— James Joyce (Dubliners)

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another s soul."
— James Joyce

"Redheaded women buck like goats."
— James Joyce

"We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us."
— Marcel Proust

"Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way"
— Marcel Proust

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."
— Marcel Proust

"The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost."
— Marcel Proust

"Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them."
— Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II - The Guermantes Way & Cities of the Plain)

"The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it."
— Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)

"with one image he would make that beauty explode into me."
— proust, trans. lydia davis

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
— Albert Einstein

"I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer."
— Woody Allen

"My tastes are simple: I am easily satisfied with the best."
— Winston S. Churchill

"And remember, no matter where you go, there you are."
— Earl Mac Rauch

"The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again."
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone)

"I find it a huge strain to be responsible for my tastes and be known and defined by them."
— Jonathan Franzen (Strong Motion)

"Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.) "
— Jonathan Franzen

"I wanted all of her and resented other boys for wanting any part of her."
— Jonathan Franzen (The Discomfort Zone)

"Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."
— Jonathan Franzen (How to Be Alone: Essays)

"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
— David Foster Wallace

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer."
— David Foster Wallace

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated."
— David Foster Wallace

"Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me."
— David Foster Wallace

"There is no God and we are his prophets."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"That which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"You keep runnin that mouth and I'm goin to take you back there and screw you."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Men of God and men of war have strange affinities."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"Scared money can’t win and a worried man can’t love."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"You are either born a writer or you are not."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said"
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"Justice? -- You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law."
— William Gaddis

""One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic." "
— Robert Musil

"Anyone who still wants to experience fairytales these days can’t afford to dither when it comes to using their brains.
"
— Robert Musil

"The thought is not something that observes an inner event, but, rather it is this inner event itself. We do not reflect on something, but, rather, something thinks itself in us. "
— Robert Musil

"Love loves to love love."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."
— Herman Melville

"Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me."
— Herman Melville

"Call Me Ishmael"
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it, and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic."
— Herman Melville

"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed."
— Herman Melville

"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. "
— Herman Melville

"...for we are all dreadfully cracked about the head and sadly need mending."
— Herman Melville