"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