"You don't have to stay anywhere forever."
— Neil Gaiman (The Sandman Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)

"I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
— James Baldwin (Giovanni's Room)

"Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"All that is transitory is but a metaphor."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The way the function dictates the form... elegant lines... nothing extraneous... this shoe perfectly expresses the essence of shoeness."
— David Mazzucchelli (Asterios Polyp)

"If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?"
— R. Buckminister Fuller

"There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance."
— Julie Powell (Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen)

"Not a single object seems to possess a practical use. The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn, It is exactly the same sort of sensation I get when I enter the Comedie-Francaise or the Palaise- Royal Theatre; ; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armor, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases. Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively."
— Javier Marias

""I close my eyes
Only for a moment,
then the moment's gone
All my dreams
Pass before my eyes, a curiosity...

Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground,
though we refuse to see...

Now, don't hang on
Nothing lasts forever
but the earth and sky
It slips away
And all your money
won't another minute buy...

Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind."

(Kansas guitarist Kerry Livgren wrote this after reading a book of Native American poetry. The line that caught his attention was "For All We Are Is Dust In The Wind.")"
— Kansas

"My days are subbed, and my dreams are dubbed. "
— Akosce

"We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well."
— Javier Marias