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