I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. - Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance"

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen." The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that laid under the sun that felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

-- Willa Cather, My Ántonia

"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