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

Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul -- but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them -- but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way -- but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us -- we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.

Thomas Wolfe
"Look Homeward, Angel"

"The girls are made up of two halves -- one half is with the conservatory and only participates for money and feels like God's gift to the world, and the others are with the drama school. They don't get paid, but pay for it -- and feel like a million dollars. The same thing is true for the male extras. And they carry on in a way that I've never seen before in my life and treat me with condescension, which they are going to regret. And the real actors look down on those from the drama school and are sure to let them know. They also look down on each other, but that they don't show too much. In any case, there's a hell a lot of looking down on each other, and everyone thinks they're the only one who's wonderful. And the janitors are the only ones who act like normal people and greet you when you say hello to them."
--from The Artificial Silk Girl By Irmgard Keun

"My mother told me that Abuela Celia was an atheist before I even understood what the word meant. I liked the sound of it, the derision with which my mother pronounced it, and knew immediately it was what I wanted to become. I don't know exactly when I stopped believing in God. It wasn't as deliberate as deciding, at age six, to become an atheist, but more like an imperceptible sloughing of layers. One day I noticed there was no more skin to absently peel, just air where there'd been artifice."
--Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia

People always tell you to be honest with them but they are lying. No one wants that. Honesty sucks. That's why it is always preceded by words like 'brutal' or 'painful'
Everyone seems to hide the truth somehow
Maybe everyone has a reason to hide the truth. Honesty creates more problems than it solves, sometimes it can even kill. That's why people are afraid of the truth
-from Fearless By Francine Pascal

“I am an invisible man... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
-from the invisible man by Ralph Ellison

There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.

There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why-- when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead, when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.

-Kate Chopin from The Awakening

And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right hand side. It was called "Perfectly Contented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but the same flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. "Pleading Child" was shorter but slower, "Perfectly Contented" was longer and faster. And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song. -Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club

I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable. Because, even as a young child, I could sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ones that chased my mother until she hid in a dark corner of her mind. And still they found her, I watched, over the years, as they devoured her, piece by piece, until she disappeared and became a ghost. -Amy Tan in The Joy Luck Club

"Though here at journey's end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and Stars forever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell."
-Sam, The Return of the King

"I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. I must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to given them up, lose them, so that others may keep them."
-Frodo, The Return of the King

"I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death."
"Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends."
-Frodo and Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring

"I wish none of this had happened."
"So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
-Frodo and Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring

"Oh, nowadays so many conceited peole go about Society pretending to be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend to be bad. Besides, there is this to be said. If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
-Lord Darlington from Lady Wyndermere's Fan By Oscar Wilde

There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk 'his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor' on an outcome dubious.
-Robert A. Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
-J.R.R Tolkein The Lord of the RIngs trilogy

"God creates dinosaurs; God destroys dinosaurs; God creates man; Man destroys God; Man creates dinosaurs."
--Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton)

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that
brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over
me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to its
path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain
--Frank Herbert Dune

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
-- Anne Frank, diary entry (1944)