"You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually places where you get killed."
— Rick Riordan (The Battle of the Labyrinth)

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

"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise."
— Victor Hugo (Ninety-Three)

"The path to paradise begins in hell."
— Dante Alighieri

"The mind can make a heaven out of hell and a hell out of heaven."
— John Milton

"Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels."
— Henry Miller (Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch)

"Still paying, still to owe.
Eternal woe! "
— John Milton

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Keroauc

"The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see."
— Edward Abbey

"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"Now comes the mystery! (last words)"
— Henry Ward Beecher

"I am still in the land of the dying; I shall be in the land of the living soon. (his last words)"
— John Newton

"What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"'Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.'

'It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.'
"
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings)

"Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"When I am a good host, I can order the world precisely as I believe it ought to be. It is a world that I have created in my mind and in my own image, and it gladdens me profoundly to see it unfold without original sin, without expulsions and floods and disobedience and illness. When I am a good guest, I have returned to Eden, where everything I need is provided for me, including companionship and a benevolent deity at my shoulder serving me and protecting me. The concept of paradise may be backward-looking but the concept of heaven is anticipatory. Perhaps this is what heaven will be like? A great table of oak worn smooth with age and candle wax; a dimly lit room, a quartet of angels playing Sarah Vaughan in the corner; this blissful throb of quiet, intelligent conversation; bubbling pots and aromatic stews that no one seems to have worked to prepare; and you - you have nothing to worry about, not now, not here, not for all eternity. Leave it all behind at the threshold, forget everything, for here in heaven, you are my guest. "
— Jesse Browner

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."
— Borges, Jorge Luis

"This horror will grow mild, this darkness light."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong naming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition ; there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms."
— John Milton

"They changed their minds, Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell."
— John Milton

"How small these rescued tides appear! Earthly delights flow in torrents. Each object offers paradise."
— André Breton (Magnetic Fields)

"I don't like Paradise,
As they probably don't have obsessions there."
— Alda Merini

"The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell)

"This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell."
— Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster)

"Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps--located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq."
— Eric Weiner (The Geography of Bliss)

"Even if you fall on the runway, I wouldn't blame you. It would mean that we made a mistake in choosing you."
— Ai Yazawa (Paradise Kiss, Volume 4)

"After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication." "
— William L. Stull

"The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden."
— Eve Babitz (Sex and rage: Advice to young ladies eager for a good time : a novel)

"I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
"
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative..."
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)

"Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it."
— Jules Renard

"I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise."
— Sam Shepard (Cruising Paradise: Tales)

"So farewell hope and, with hope, farewell fear; Farewell remorse. All good to me is lost."
— John Milton

"What did people - from their very infancy - pray for, dream about, long for? They longed for some one to tell them, once and for all, the meaning of happiness, and then to bind them to it with a chain. What are we doing now, if not this very thing? The ancient dream of paradise... Remember: those in paradise no longer know desires, no longer know pity or love. There are only the blessed, with their imaginations excised (this is the only reason why they are blessed) - angels, obedient slaves of God... And now, at the very moment when we have already caught up with dream, when we have seized it so, when all that needed to done was to the quarry and divide it into shares - at this very moment you... you... "
— Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)