"Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing."
— Margaret Chittenden

"The netherworld is timeless and unchanging, and boring -- much like a doctor's waiting room."
— Christopher Moore (Practical Demonkeeping)

"Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare."
— James Baldwin

""I finally figured out that not every crisis can be managed. As much as we want to keep ourselves safe, we can't protect ourselves from everything. If we want to embrace life, we also have to embrace chaos.""
— Susan Elizabeth Phillips

"It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things. "
— Lemony Snicket

"By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes."
— E.M. Forster

"“Care to see your room?” -Bones
“Let me guess—it’s that smashed‐up car right over there." -Cat"
— Jeaniene Frost (Destined for an Early Grave)

"The angels threw glitter up there, just for you, Zoe, Daddy had told er. They celebrated almost as much as I did the day you were born. Every time you look up there you remember how special you are - so special the nagels threw a big party."
— mary pearson

""The thought weaves into her unexpectedly, as so many thoughts do, time again. How do you make the remembering stop?"
"
— mary pearson

"There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?" And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; "I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture." There comes an aha-moment for some folks - the lucky ones - when they suddenly recognize the difference."
— Stephen King

"It was the hotel room that first set me in a bad mood."
— Alysha Speer (Sharden)

""Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word ad immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the the beautiful room is empty." Franz Kafka (in a letter to Milena Jesenska)"
— Edmund White (The Beautiful Room Is Empty)

"If you don't say anything it can't become important, but if you say it everyone's ever after got to walk round it like a pile of rocks in the living room."
— Philip Hensher (The Northern Clemency)

"The thought weaves into her unexpectedly, as so many thought do, time again. How do you make the remembering stop?"
— mary pearson