"All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"At the center of your being
you have the answer;
you know who you are
and you know what you want."
— Laozi

"Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)

"The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself."
— Douglas Adams

"It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

"Till this moment I never knew myself."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"'From a distance,' he says, 'my car looks just like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has.'

Jesus. I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.

'So,' Lemry says quietly, 'your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?'

Ellerby shakes his head. 'My subject will be shame.'"
— Chris Crutcher (Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes)

"How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement - no matter how temporary."
— Craig Thompson (Blankets)

"It was Russia, January 5, 1943, and just another icy day. Out among the city and snow, there were dead Russians and Germans everywhere. Those who remained were firing into the blank pages in front of them. Three languages interwove. The Russian, the bullets, the German."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities."
— Edgar Allan Poe (The Purloined Letter)

"No, I don't want to battle from beginning to end,
I don't want to cycle or recycle revenge,
I don't want to follow death and all his friends."
— Coldplay

"The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes."
— Louise Erdrich (The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse)

"If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us."
— Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

"And he whose soul is flat -- the sky
Will cave in on him by and by."
— Edna St. Vincent Millay (Renascence And Other Poems)

"To travel is to be born and to die at every instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse; we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing; each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
"
— Miller

"My family was something precious, like jewelry, like a necklace you never take off."
— Indira Ganesan (Inheritance)

"They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are 17 miles from a town which has 90 miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the convent, but there is time, and the day has just begun. They are nine. Over twice the number of the women, they are obliged to stampede or kill, and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement--rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, mace, and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns."
— Toni Morrison (Paradise)

"Science is nothing but a piece of trash before a profound dream."
— Chairman; Paprika

"All that blooms must fall."
— Marilyn Chin (The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty)

"No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city."
— C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold)

"You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
— Annie Dillard

"The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness."
— Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)

"...I really think you should hit 'undo'."
— William Franklin Lewis