"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