"People need not fear the unknown if they are capable of achieving what they need and want."
— Paulo Coelho

"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

" I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already."
— Mary Stewart (Nine Coaches Waiting)

"First, I'm going to give you all the Copperfield crap, and I'm not going to apologize for any of it, not one paragraph, so if you're not interested in how I came to see the future, or how I came to understand that the biggest truth in my life was a lie, or, for that matter, how I parlayed my distaste for hot dogs into an '84 RX-7 and a new self-concept, do us both a favor, and just stop now."
— Jonathan Evison (All About Lulu)

"They found out about him in July and stayed angry all through August. They tried to kill him in September. It was way too soon. They weren't ready. The attempt was a failure. It could have been a disaster, but it was actually a miracle. Because nobody noticed."
— Lee Child (Without Fail)

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony."
— Rafael Sabatini (Scaramouche)

"Art Matthews shot himself, loudly and messily, in front of the parade grounds at Dunstable Races."
— Dick Francis, Dead Cert

""The World is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it""
— V.S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River)