"All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot!"
— Dr. Seuss (Oh, the Places You'll Go! and The Lorax)

"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Death is peaceful, easy. Life is harder..."
— Stephenie Meyer

"The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror...so today I vetoed it"
— George W. Bush

"Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe– a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave."
— Michael Chabon (Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories)

"...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along. "
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

"...whether the people are happy or not in their lives, they have learned to keep steadily moving, moving all the time."
— Chang Rae Lee (A Gesture Life)

"Hasn't it been a long time since you had a flying dream?"
— Douglas Coupland (JPod: A Novel)

"I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible."
— Joseph O'Neill (Netherland)