"There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have." Atonement By Ian McEwan

"I wander from one room to another, downstairs and up again, feeling like a songbird whose wings have been clipped and who is hurling himself in utter darkness against the bars of his cage. "Go outside, laugh, and take a breath of fresh air," a voice cries within me, but I don't even feel a response any more, I go and lie on the divan and sleep, to make the time pass more quickly, and the stillness and the terrible fear, because there is no way of killing them." - "The Diary Of A Young Girl" Anne Frank.

"What are you afraid of, then?""Not being able to see, I think," she said."Being blind, you mean?""No, not that. . . . I mean . . . not seeing because you're obsessed by something that blots out the world. Some sort of mania or belief. Or passion. That awful kind of love that makes leaves and birds and cherry blossom invisible because it's not the face of some man." -A Song For Summer - Eva Ibbotson

"For a time you can be alone and doing fine and never give a thought to living any other way and then you meet someone and suddenly you become lonely. It stabs at you, almost like a physical pain, and you feel both deprived and angry, deprived because you wish to be with that person and angry, because their absence brings you misery." - Magic Bites - Ilona Andrews

There are three rules one should live by, if one intends to make it successfully through life: Don't carry a sofa upstairs by yourself. Don't get involved with a Scorpio unless you mean it. And don't argue with crazy people. -Help I am Being Held Prisoner - Donald E. Westlake

"People who claim they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of. "-- Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

"My whole life, I wanted to be dead, but I didn't actually do anything about it. I guess I didn't want to be dead; I wanted relief. I wanted to be happy and peaceful.""That's it," she said. "It's not about dying; it's about stopping the pain." -"Driving With Dead People" Monica Holloway.

"Ester asked why people are sad."That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.”" - The Zahir by Paulo Coelho

Through the open doors, I can see Simon and his family, smiling, content, not a care in the world. Everything is theirs—not for the taking but for the having. They do not know hunger or fear or doubt. They do not have to fight for what they want. It is simply there, waiting, and they walk into it. My heart aches. I would so very much like to wrap myself in the warm blanket of them. But I have seen too much to live in that blanket. - Rebel Angels by Libba Bray

"This is what it means to be an adventurer in our day: to give up creature comforts of the mind, to realize possibilities of imagination. Because everything around us says no you cannot do this, you cannot live without that, nothing is useful unless its in service to money, to gain, to stability. The adventurer gives in to tides of chaos, trusts the world to support her--and in doing so turns her back on the fear and obedience she has been taught. She rejects the indoctrination of impossibility.My adventure is a struggle for freedom." -Off the Map by Hib Chickena and Kika Kat

Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask:"What does his voice sound like?" "What games does he like best?" "Does he collect butterflies?" They ask:"How old is he?" "How many brothers does he have?" "How much does he weigh?" "How much does his father make?" Only then do they think they know him. If you tell grown-ups, "I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof...," They won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them "I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs." Then they exclaim, "What a pretty house!"...That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups. -The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Do you not see God in your science? How can you miss Him! You proclaim that even the slightest change in the force of gravity or the weight of an atom would have rendered our universe a lifeless mist rather then our magnificent sea of heavenly bodies, and yet you fail to see God's hand in this? Is it really so much easier to believe that we simply chose the right care from a deck of billions? Have we become so spiritually bankrupt that we would rather believe in mathematical impossibility than in a power greater then us?"--from Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown

"Her body felt like it'd been beaten with a hose. This must be what it felt like to get old. It wasn't that your body fell apart from living so long. It was that you had to take so many stompings from life that you'd be happy when the time came to close your eyes and never open them again." -"Paint It Black" Janet Fitch.

She unfolded the money, then pushed it up her sleeve, "Whatchyouwant?" she asked Richard, suspiciously. "Nothing," said Richard. "I really don't want anything. Nothing at all." And then he realized how true that was; and how dreadful a thing it had become. "Have you ever got everything you ever wanted and then realized it wasn't what you wanted at all?" -Neverwhere. Neil Gaiman.

'It was always the first thing he noted to himself about rich people; they always seemed to be tan, as if their money awarded them more sunlighht than was allowed to shine down on poor people" -Icarus by Russell Andrews

"I figured the real tragedy in modern life wasn’t that there were no heroes left, like some people say, but more like all those potential heroes are stuck in traffic or on sitting on the can when you really needed them. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time to do their thing. That, I believe, is the petty truth."
- Kristyn Dunnion "Mosh Pit"

He asked me if I loved him, and I didn't know what to say. Sure, I thought I loved him, but it never dawned on me to actually say so. That freaked me out.
"Ask me that again, okay?"
That stopped him for a second. "Do you love me?"
"With feeling."
"Do you love me?"
"Yes, I love you."
"Say that again, okay?"
"Yes, I love you."
"With feeling."
"I love you. My love for you feels like birds soaring up from a thousand peaks."
Weakly he said,"Don't love me."
Beijing Doll, by:Chun Sue

"time passes. even when it seems impossible. even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. it passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. even for me"
New Moon by Stephenie Meyer.

the only thing that really matters is being happy. i dont mean that in a hedonistic way, like you should get wasted all the time. i'm just saying, it's easy to get in a rut where all you think about is the future; but the future never turns out the way you expect. it's not a news flash, i know. but maybe it should be. then maybe it wouldn't be so easy to forget. -from mabye a miracle; by brian strause

I am the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Chesire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artifical warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villians in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who looks to very vibrant and you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with everyday that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly and darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer that I can't even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.
-- prozac nation

“I am not saying religion is bad. When it turns men and women inward and helps them realize that they are…great…, that there is an ocean of love and silence deep within the heart, then it is useful. But where it divides people against one another, where one person is led to believe that he is saved and another is damned, or where it leads a person to believe that true happiness will be found only in an afterlife, then it is harmful. Each life on Earth is very precious. It is a wonderful thing to be alive.”
--Christopher Pike, Remember Me 2: The Return

"If someone's walking in the hills and discovers a seam of gold, I think if they walk away without digging it, they're just stupid. When something that lucky happens to you, thinking it's unfair for you to strike it rich all by yourself doesn't mean you're selfless. When great happiness unexpectedly swoops down on people, they suddenly turn into cowards. Snatching happiness takes a lot more courage than enduring unhappiness. When you find something precious, you have to hold on to it with all your might and never let it go, whatever else you may lose. After all, there are lots of people who die witout ever finding something that's really precious to them. So don't blow your big chance."

When I finished speaking, I turned my back on my mother and started walking away. What a classy thing for a first-grader to say, and to her own mother at that! I turned over the words of my speech in my head as I slowly made my way home, thinking I was pretty hot stuff. That last "don't blow your big chance" was really good, the way it sounded like a killer phrase from a movie or something. Having a cool one-liner at the end made the preachy part before it really come alive. But delivering it with my backpack on was kinda lame---maybe took the impact out of it?... ~pg.27 Kamikaze Girls, by Novala Takemoto

Every now and then I'll be so sad and so lazy that I'll pay someone to interpret it all in needle and ink. "Do what you like," I say, because the eventual pattern is irrelevant. I just want to feel the needle and see, next day, next week, forever, the reminder that it really happened, that I really was that sad. Because when I'm on the upswing, manic as anything, I can't imagine that I will ever come down."

- from "Thin Skin" Emma Forrest.

"An Addict is an Addict. It doesn't matter whether the Addict is white, black, yellow or green, rich or poor or somewhere in the middle, the most famous Person on the Planet or the most unknown. It doesn't matter whether the addiction is drugs, alcohol, crime, sex, shopping, food, gambling, television, or the fucking Flintstones. The life of the Addict is always the same. There is no excitement, no glamour, no fun. There are no good times, there is no joy, there is no happiness. There is no future and no escape. There is only an obsession. To make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth."
-from A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey

"I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince Of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without a doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo la la! - to tell all.
All? Some. I'm toying with that for a title: Some. Got a post-millennial modestry to it, don't you think? Some. My side of the story. The funk. The jive. The boogie. The rock and roll. (I invented rock and roll. You wouldn't believe the things I've invented. Anal sex, obviously. Smoking. Astrology. Money...Let's save time: Everything in the world that distracts you from thinking about God. Which...pretty much...is everything in the world, isn't it? Gosh.)"

- "I, Lucifer" Glen Duncan.

"sometimes when i walk through the rain, i know that each drop that falls on me wasn't meant to fall on anybody else. other times i take and umbrella to shield myself from the randomness. you are a product of your upbringing. you are the product of your society. you are the product of your times. you are the product of your astrological chart. you are the product of peer pressure. you are the product of your maker. which is it? maybe God was really hung over the morning he stumbled out of bed and created me" -The traveling death and resurrection show by ariel gore.

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve arealization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself. ~Ralph Ellison, "Battle Royal"

"When I was twelve, a fortune-teller told me that my one true love was going to die young and leave me all alone. Everyone said she was a fraud, that she was making it up. Id really like to know why the hell a person would make up a thing like that."


--God-Shaped Hole byTiffanie Debartolo

"But forgiveness.. I'll hold onto that fragile slice of hope and keep it close, remembering that in each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We're each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We've got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there's an awful lot of gray to work with. No one can live in the light all the time."
-From A Great and Terrible Beauty

the little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"you are not at all like my rose," he said. "as yet you are nothing. no one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. you are like my fox when i first knew him. he was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. but i have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

and the roses were very much embarrassed.

"you are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "one could not die for you. to be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. but in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that i have watered; because it is she that i have put under the glass globe; because it is she that i have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that i have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that i have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. because she is my rose."

-The Little Prince

"Girls have all the breaks. They get to wait to be asked out, they get to say no all the time, and they have their famous periods.
I mean, there are mothers who cry for happiness when their daughters start. It's a regular celebration.
What does a guydo with his first hard-on? It's not like he runs to Dad and they shake hands enthusiastically and Dad hands over a bunch of condoms and says, "Now you're a man, son, because you've got this dandy tool. Treat it carefully. Don't stick it in a sheep or a blender, okay? And gosh darn it, your mother and I are real proud of you."
- "Where The Kissing Never Stops" Ron Koertge.

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding... black and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author.
-The Penultimate Peril by Lemon Snicket

I'd learned about the places I wanted to go, I'd talked about them with friends, but I hadn't actually set foot outside my door. The terrain of my hear, the landscape of love, was still entirely unexplored. But people are right when they say the hardest step of every journey was the first, and I was scared.
-Geography Club By Brent Hartinger

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
-Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bronte

She studied him for a while, almost envying his complete disregard for anyone but himself. He had no talent, no ambition and no pride, yet he looked so happy lying there with that slight smile on his lips.
—Agnes Owens, from When Shankland Comes

"In the end, prehaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke thats continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The soul is the punch line."

Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins

"He stands there waiting, and when nobody makes a move to say anything to him he commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there's nothing funny going on. But it's not the way that Public Relation laughs, it's free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger until it's lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it's the first laugh I've heard in years." -One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

"You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death."
- A Stroke of Midnight by Laurell K. Hamilton

"...there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror--on the things I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching...has come down to this: beware of muddle."
--A Room with a View E.M. Forster

"Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends and integrity. And your keeping them in the air. But one day you finally come to the understanding that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls- family, health, friends and integrity- are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lessons of the five balls, you have the beginnings of balance in your life." -From Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson

"When I look back at my life and compare it to what I had imagined it would be, it has been a strenouous journey along a mountainous path with breathtaking views. I was taught to look toward heaven to find God, but I searched my own heart and found light, joy and God's breath of truth inside me. I believe in the connectedness of us all with our own luminosity humming a story of truth and love in the space between the stars. What glows, even in the dark, is the power of Divine Presence." -Space Between the Stars By Deborah Santana

"Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo." - The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you." - Holden in Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger.)

"... For this in the end is what we have. The love of something... There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with... We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again... The wheel turns. Blue above, green below, we wander a long way, but love is what the cup of our soul contains when we leave the world and the flesh."
-Louise Murphy, The True Story of Hansel and Gretel A Novel of War and Survival

"....I remember the day he smiled at me and said, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?''No, what?' I said.'A piece of dust.' And he looked so proud of having thought of this that I just stared at his blond hair and his blue eyes and his white teeth - he had very long, strong white teeth - and said 'I guess so.'It was only in the middle of New York a whole year later that I finally thought of an answer to that remark. I spent a lot of time having imaginary conversations with Buddy Willard. He was a couple of years older than I was and very scientific, so he could always prove things. When I was with him I had to work to keep my head above water. These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I'd really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying 'I guess so'.Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?''No, what?' I would say.'A piece of dust."Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.My trouble was I took everythinbg Buddy Willard told me as the honest-to-god truth....."-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use— silence, exile and cunning. -A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Sally Owens: Sometimes I feel there is a hole inside me... An emptiness that, at times, seems to burn. I think if you lifted my heart to your ear, you could probably hear the ocean. And the moon tonight: there's a circle around it --- a sign of trouble not far behind. I have this dream of being whole... Of not going to sleep each night wanting, but still sometimes, when the wind is warm or the crickets sing, I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for. I just want someone to love me. I want to be seen. I don't know... Maybe I've had my happiness. I don't want to believe it, but there is no man... Only that moon.

-Dreaming of Lovewritten by Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, & Adam Brooks, from the novel by Alice Hoffman

"The best kind of love, it's not always an easy road. Because life will throw you curve balls. People change, people grow and sad things happen sometimes. I think that the greatest loves are those that have overcome obstacles because they have withstood those things that life can throw at them." -The Notebook By Nicholas Sparks

Diary By Chuck Palahniuk
Just for the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.
You writting, you walking down a street, your whole life shows in every physical action. How you hold your shoulders, Angel says. It's all an art. What you do with your hands, you're always blabbing your life story.
Who knows where an idea comes from. Our insparation. Why do we imagine what we imagine.
"What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift."
Your handwritting . The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self-portrait.
Its funny the way your mind tries to make sense of chaos.
The truth is, wherever you choose to be, it's the wrong place.
"We all die." She says, " The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will".
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to rember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We must learn so little from peace.
What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.
What the don't teach you in art school. How you're still always trapped.
People killed in a fire, people in long-term vegetative state, they all end up posed about the same. The same as a baby waiting to be born.

Wonder When you'll Miss me- By Amanda Davis
It was like I'd left behind something at Berrybrook besides the forty-eight pounds and seven months. Some invisable part of my brain forgotten on a shelf somewhere, some key ingredient to navigating the world abandoned in that stupid Tudor buliding on that stupid green hill. I didn't even know how to look for what was gone, how to recognize it if I found it. How to ask for help.
But I didn't want to be better than anyone. I just wanted to be me. And, yes, I wanted to show up, to be noticed. But inside some of me still wanted desperately to disappear. Of course that's what had gotten me to Beryybrook in the first place: trying to disappear.
Then each morning I woke up to the blinding Berrybrook sunlight and thought I was a little girl in my bed at home again, that my father would come and wake me at any minute. And then, slowly, I blinked awake to the ceiling tiles and the scrffed wood floor, the chrome-rimmerd bed and the hum of the room, and relized that I'd grown up.
But it was just one more thing. One more way the days would form and even at the bottom of everything I was, I just didn't care that much right then. It was all about one more day and just for now and every other cliche in the world. It was all about waking and eating and running and sleeping. And it was about getting through to the next day, all of it even, nobody hurt. Me alive, though I still wasn't sure i wanted to be.
"Careful." She gave a snort. "Jesus. You're so careful that you're a danger to yourself..."

When he says, "I love you, honey," you realize that he never calls you by your name. You will say good-bye for all the right reasons. You're tired of living in wait for his apocalypse. You have your own fight on your hands, and though it's no bigger or more noble than his, it will rewuire all of your energy. It's you who has to hold on to the earth. You have to tighten your grip- which means letting go of him.

-The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

Before dinner, my grandmother read the newspaper, tsk-tsking and complaining to no one in particular that the world was going to hell. Everything was wrong; nothing was the way it used to be."What do you think was so good about the good old days?" I asked in exasperation. But I heard how harsh my voice was and didn't like it. I said, "What do you miss, I mean?"While she thought, I waite to make my point: that everything was much better now than it used to be; I'd cite the civil rights and women's movements."The boy who lit the street lamps in the evening," she said, finally. "HE carried a stool with him."I understood then-- it was like missing Nantucket-- and I put my hand on top of hers. It occure dto me that everything was more complicated than I thought. - The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

"To die, to sleep - to sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause; there's the respect that makes calamity of so long life"
-- 'Hamlet' Shakespeare

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.--Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."-Nicholas Sparks, "The Notebook"

"I'd begun to realise that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner-table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame."
- The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

~Oscar Wilde,The Picture of Dorian Gray

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. 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 had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
-James Baldin, Giovanni's Room

"We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us."

Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden

Quote from Sexus by Henry Miller
"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes deperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

"You know the feeling of recognition you get when you look in a mirror? 'That's me,' you think to yourself, 'My hair needs to be combed and, hey, there's a pimple on my nose!' Well I got that same feeling no matter where I looked. I looked at the asphalt road and it was my face. I looked at the bridge and the bridge was me staring back at myself. It was a physical sensation, as if the sky had my eyes and could see me staring up at it. There was no doubt that this state was 'true.' It was far more true than the state I had considered to be normal up until then. I had no need to confirm it with anyone.
It's all me."-Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen

"...There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."

"And that covers everybody?"

"Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types."

Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco

STANLEY: Your looks are okay.
STELLA: I was fishing for a compliment, Stanley.
STANLEY: I don't go in for that stuff.
STELLA: What--stuff?
STANLEY: Compliments to women about their looks. I never met a woman that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they've got. I once went out with a doll who said to me, "I am the glamorous type, I am the glamorous type!" I said, "So what?"

-A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

..And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual.
--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?"

-The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

“Love, desire, and need get all confused and they fight and switch clothes just to fuck with me. But all three burn and ache and when mixed are this dangerous chemical compound that releases poisonous gases from my eyes, clouds of readable smoke, inscribed with all my naked wishes and poetry. And these are the times I want to close my eyes to the world, and these are the times that they are so wide open I scarcely take the time to blink, usually racing from one club, one bed, to another. Love is what makes me keep writing and trying and doing it over and over until I get it right.”
-Thea Hillman, from Depending on the Light

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
-Anais Nin, Oct. 27, 19333, from Incest

"Everyone has a moment in his history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person 'the world today' or 'life' or 'reality' he will assume you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever."-John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn’t want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor’s office, or coming back from someplace you didn’t enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus-- all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised when I told them I’d learned how; Mother just nodded and
smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat.”


John Crowley
Little, Big

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but it's people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an american to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
Kurt Vonnegut "Slaughterhouse Five"

"When I opened my eyes, the window across from us was dark red and I coudl feel that there was not much time left. Outside, the world I had watched for so long was living and breathing on the same earth I now was. But I knew I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead-- in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death -- the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human -- feelingas you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light-- all it part of navigating the unknown." -The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold

Excerpt from "'Jiving' with Your Teen," by Seaton Smith
"Anyone who has observed the youths of American knows they frequently take liberties with the English language in order to flaunt their illiteracy and impress the opposite sex. As a parent, it is vital that you understand their vocabulary - like a cheetah, your teen can sense your confusion and fear. When you master thein vocabulary you can finally tell them, in their own language, that the police at the front door are for them.

Here are a few mandatory words and phrases to use when speaking to your teen:

Dope - A slang word that refers to every teenager's horrific need to associate what he or she considers 'good' with deadly narcotics. When this phrase is uttered, do not panic. Simply reply with: 'Yeah, dog, I got the stash up my cavity.'

It's all good - A shortened term from its original version, 'It's all good when you're employing illegal narcotics and eganing in immoral sexual activity.' Your teen doesn't mean that everything in the world is 'good.' He or she means that everything in the poverty-stricken inner-city ghetto is 'good.'

Cool - One of the most enduring slang terms in American culture. The word "Cool" has seen many forms. As a youth, you probably used the term sensibly: 'Hot dog! It's cool outside, Mabel.' Your teenager uses it in a different context:

'That's Cool.'
Translation: Marijuana is being smoked.

'That is so Cool.'
Translation: A lot of marijuana is being smoked.

'Not Cool.'
Translation: The dog is being smoked."

from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
translated by Alan B. Clarke

That was what made traveling appeal to [the shepherd boy]--he always made new friends, and he didn't need to spend all of his time with them. When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.

"He had this weird thing where he would look at the stars, and imagine they were the lights of a city, and think about what kinds of people would live there. It's like he knew he couldn't understand the stars.

..."I think he wanted people to look at them like he looked at the stars, and think about what kind of person would live in that body."

-From My Loose Thread, by Dennis Cooper

Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention.

The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd

I tried finding solace looking at the squirrels in the front yard. . . -- and then I got to thinking about how short their lives are -- so short that their dreams can only possibly be a full mirroring of their waking lives. So I guess for a squirrel, being awake and being asleep are the same thing. Maybe when you die young it's like that too.
Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus!

And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then--whether you were man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or independent, fortunate or unfortunate, whether you ranked with royalty and wore a glittering crown or in humble obscurity bore the toil and heat of the day, whether your name will be remembered as long as the world stands and consequently as long as it stood or you are nameless and run nameless in the innumerable multitude, whether the magnificence encompassing you surpassed all human description or the most severe and ignominious human judgment befell you--eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether you have despaired in such a way that you did not realize that you were in despair, or in such a way that you covertly carried this sickness inside of you as your gnawing secret, as a fruit of sinful love under your heart, or in such a way that you, a terror to others, raged in despair. And if so, if you have lived in despair, then, regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you--or, still more terrible, it knows you as you are known and it binds you to yourself in despair.
These words are Soren Kierkegaard, from "The Sickness Unto Death."

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends-books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smoky London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of lights, monsters rising out of weedy twarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked once another...

I used to think the world would be like that when I got older. Wonderful all the time, exciting, happy. Instead of the way it is...


So you want to be a Wizard, Diane Duane

The photo has been cut; a third of it has been cut off. In the lower left corner there's a hand, scissored off at the wrist, resting on the grass. It's the hand of the other one, the one who is always in the picture whether seen or not. The hand that will set things down.

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next--if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions--you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

Drowned now--the tree as well, the sky, the wind, the clouds. All she has left is the picture. Also the story of it.

The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.

--Margaret Atwood, "The Blind Assassin"

William Faulkner-As I Lay Dying
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."

"...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words."

"Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am more preoccupied with loving."
--Anais Nin, Henry and June.

As for myself, I'd rather not say very much. When I breathe, the air feels good in my chest. And when I think of the mirrored room, as of course I still do, I understand now that it's empty, filled with chimeras like Charlotte Swenson--the hard, beautiful seashells left behind long after the living creatures within have struggled free and swum away. Or died. Life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes. Even as we try to reveal the mystery of ourselves, to catch it unawares, expose its pulse and flinch and peristalisis, the truth has slipped away, burrowed further inside a dark, coiled pirvacy that replenishes itself like blood. It cannot be seen, much as one might wish to show it. It dies the instant it is touched by light.


Once or twice a year I still call my old voice mail, just to see if the outgoing message is the one I recorded myself. My hand shakes as I dial the phone, and I wonder who will answer.
"Hi, it's me," comes the childish, cigarette voice from the digital void. "Leave a message, but keep it short."
"Hello," I say. "It's me."


- from Look At Me, by Jennifer Egan

CASH FOR YOUR CAR, CHECKS CASHED HERE,MARRIAGES AND DIVORCES-TWENTY FOUR HOUR DRIVE-THRU WINDOW

Coyote said,"what are these places?"
Sam tried to think of a quick explanation, but was too weary from lack of sleep to tackle the concept of Las Vegas in twenty-five words or less. Finally he said,"These are places where you go if you want to fuck up your life and you don't have a lot of time to do it in."
"are we going to stop?"


-Coyote Blue Christopher Moore

"The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There's lots of good fish in the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea. "
- D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

Dave Eggers- You Shall Know Our Velocity!
People say I talk slowly. I talk in a way sometimes called laconic. The phone rings, I answer, and people ask if they've woken me up. I lose my way in the middle of sentences, leaving people hanging for minutes. I have no control over it. I'll be talking, and will be interested in what I'm saying, but then someone- I'm convinced this is what happens-someone-and I wish I knew who, because I would have words for this person- for a short time, borrows my head. Like a battery is borrowed from a calculator to power a remote control, someone, always, is borrowing my head.

From "Why I Write":

I collected those long, melancholy lists of the great books that high school English teachers passed out to college-bound students, and I relied on having consumed those serious litanies of books as a way to ease my way into the literary life.

Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly and for all time. Great writing sticks to your soul the way beggar's lice adheres to your pants cuffs after a walk through untended fields. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book in which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.

Here is what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed me with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

All through my life I have told myself -- no, ordered myself -- to read more deeply, read everything of consequence, let the words of some new writer settle like the dust of silica into the ledges and sills of my consciousness.

It is simply a fact that some people long to travel the entire world, and do not flinch from nights in wild forests or from the heat of the desert or from the anger of a tempest. It is simply a fact that some men long to climb the loftiest of mountains, others to explore the harshness of Antarctica, others still to circumnavigate the world in hot-air balloons. Why do they do it? For the challenge, we are expected to believe. And the newspapers and the journalists will not shut up about these people. But there are other, more modest people, whom for the most part the journalists avoid, who are frightened to step out into a street. It is a fact that it is too challenging for them. They cannot do it. This latter group of people, who almost always exist in solitude, are so panicked by the world that they close themselves up inside houses, inside rooms, and never leave again. The longer they stay inside the harder it is for them to peer out; they may be brave enough at first to touch door handles but very soon it will be impossible for them to turn them.
--from Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City, Edward Carey

...and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

Vanity Fair, William M. Thackeray

He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

There was a line for Santa and a line for the women's bathroom, and one woman, after asking me a dozen questions already, asked, "Which is the line for the women's bathroom?" I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it.

She said, "I'm going to have you fired."

I had two people say that to me today, "I'm going to have you fired." Go ahead, be my guest. I'm wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn't get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are?

"I'm going to have you fired!" and I wanted to lean over and say, "I'm going to have you killed."

+

From Barrel Fever, by David Sedaris

“I was functioning, moving forward, solving problems one at a time, but it was as if the very ground I walked on, the air I breathed was precarious and new. As if everything had changed, because I had changed. I knew better. I knew that no matter how bad you feel, or whatever horrible thing happens to you, that the world just keeps on going. The rest of the world doesn’t even realize that the monsters are eating your heart. A long time ago it used to bother me that I could be in such confusion, such pain, and the world just didn’t give a shit. The world, the creation as a whole, is designed to move forward, to keep on keeping on without any one individual person. It feels damned impersonal, and it is. But, then, if the world stopped rotating just because one of us was having a bad day, we’d all be floating out in space.”

~Anita, Narcissus in Chains, Laurell K. Hamilton

Edward glanced at me, then back at Olaf. "The Greeks believed that once there were no male and female, that all souls were one. Then the souls were torn apart, male and female. The Greeks thought that when you found the other half of your soul, your soul mate, that it would be your perfect lover. But I think if you find your other half, you would be too much alike to be lovers, but you would still be soul mates."

-"Obsidian Butterfly"

I'll tell you the real horrible truth, Anita. No matter what you do or how bad you feel about it, life goes on. Life doesn't give a fuck that you're sorry or upset or deranged or tormented. Life just goes on, and you gotta go on with it or sit in the middle of the road and feel sorry for yourself.

-"Blue Moon"

"This was one of those days when I thought that maybe a new life, a different life, wouldn't be so bad. But where the hell had I put the receipt, and could you return something that was over twenty yers old?" -Laurell K. Hamilton, Cerulean Sins

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
- Franz Kafka, In Senses

We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken us a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.---Nicholas Sparks - The Notebook

"For being a foreigner is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life had vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect."

- Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. [W]herever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
~The Bell Jar By Sylvia Plath

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, "You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!" The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that doesn't surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity - it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
-Life of Pi by Yann Martel

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
--the Bible