• "Suicide is not a way of ending pain; it's just a way of redistributing it."

-Borderline, Mishell Baker

• "When abstraction sets to killing you, you've got to get busy with it."

-Camus originally, cited in "An Epidemic of Signification" by Treichler

• "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."

-Catch 22, Joseph Heller

• "Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean ain’t nobody out to get you"

-Coleman Young (Mayor of Detroit)

• "The world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is utterly devastating to them."

-Robert McAfee Brown, paraphrasing Juan Luis Segundo

• "There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun."

-Wislawa Szymborska

• "Rousseau defined civilizations as when people build fences."

-Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

• "Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart."

-Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

• Hadnt I, always, but ever and ever, thought that life was just one great risk for the living?

— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• The dreams of few have turned into the curses of many.

— Metropolis, Fritz Lang

• I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don’t like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

— The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

• For the organized mind death is but the next great adventure.

— Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

• She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among the ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things; and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification- for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

— Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

• I don’t know why I am the way I am.

— Cassie

• Look at this tangle of thorns.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

• Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

— The Catcher in the Rye (last line)

• Nurse Ratched:

Why do you think you were so frightened of her? Billy Bibbit: I was in lo-l-love with her.

• You’re beautiful, but you’re empty…. No one could die for you.

— Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

• What my yia yia could never understand about America was why everyone pretended to be happy all the time.

— The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

• being a person is getting too complicated

— The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood

• You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own.

— Lolita

• There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.

— Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald

• What is your greatest ambition?

To become immortal and then die. À bout de souffle, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard (known to English Speakers as Breathless)

• He was only twenty-five. He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss—the one that is happening as you feel it.

— Emma Forrest

• I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future

-Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Part 1 Chapter 3

• I do remember, only Pooh doesn’t very well, so that’s why he likes having it told to him again. Because then it’s a real story and not just a remembering.

— Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

• Whatever we call it- mind, character, soul- we like to think we posses something that is greater than the sum of our neurons...

— pg. 137 of Girl; Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

• Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

— pg. 42 of “Girl; Interrupted” by Susanna Kaysen

• The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled- Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.

— On the Road by Jack Kerouac

• Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. -W.H. Auden

• Youth is wasted on the young

- It's a Wonderful Life

• "You're too young to be this empty, girl"

-Wow I Can Get Sexual Too, Say Anything

• "Eight miles high and falling fast"

-American Pie, Don McLean

• "And I never wanted anything from you

except everything you had and what was left after that too happiness hit her like a bullet in the back" -Dog Days are Over, Florence and the Machine

• "Ignorance is the parent of fear"

-Moby Dick

• "Cajoling men into the delusion that it was a choice"

-MD

• "Who ain't a slave? Tell me that."

-MD

• "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote"

-MD

• "Ah how cheerfully we condemn ourselves to perdition" pg. 17

-MD

• "And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!"

-MD

• "A souls a sort of fifth wheel to a wagon"

-MD

• Heaven have mercy on us all- Presbyterians and Pagans alike- for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."

-MD

• "Come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends."

-MD

• "A noble craft, but somehow most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that."

-MD

• "Thought he, its a wicked world in all meridians."

-MD

• "It's not down in any map; true places never are."

-MD

• "For there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely in contrast. Nothing exists in itself."

-MD

• "No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world."

-MD

• "You cannot hide the soul."

-MD

• "On the starboard hand of every woe there is a sure delight."

-MD

• "Sin that pays its way can travel freely and without a passport; whereas virtue if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers"

-MD

• "How it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead"

-MD

• "Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun thru water, and thinking the thick water the thinnest of air" pg. 41

-MD

• "It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We Cannibals must help these Christians." pg. 61

-MD

• "Damned in the midst of Paradise!"

-MD, chptr 37

• "And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all"

-MD (Loomings)

• "For immortality is but ubiquity in time"

-MD (chptr 41) - "God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee" -MD (chptr 44)

• "So ignorant are most landsmen... that without some hints touching the plain facts... of the fishery they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory"

-MD, (chptr 45)

• "Verily there is nothing new under the sun"

-MD, chptr 45

• "To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools, and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are the most apt to get out of order"

-MD, chptr 46

• "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own"

-MD. chptr 49

• "But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in the tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us overwhelmed."

-MD, chptr 52

• "Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals, and ready at any moment to rebel against him."

-MD, chptr 57

• "Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies on insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"

-MD, chprt 58

• "But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent,subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."

-MD, chptr 60

• "His heart had burst!"

-MD, chptr 61

• "and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eying the vast corpse he had made."

-MD, chptr 61

• "Yet habit- strange thing! What cannot habit accomplish?"

-MD, Chptr 60

• "For all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned."

-MD, chptr 64

• "And for years afterwards... leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vaccum, because their leader originally leaved there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old believes never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!"

-MD, chptr 69

• "Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul... then I account it high time to go to sea as soon as i can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly to to the ship.

- MD, chptr 1

• "Meditation and water are wedded for ever."

- MD, chptr 1

• "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."

- MD, chptr 3

• "Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closes, as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essence"

- MD, chptr 11

• "He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab."

- MD, chptr 16

• "Besides my boy, he has a wife- not three voyages wedded- a sweet resigned girl.

- MD, chptr 16

• "he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his own point of view"

-MD, chptr 17

• "I'm looking for this girl." "Yeah, aren't we all."

-American Graffiti

• "no harpooner is worth a straw who ain't pretty sharkish"

- MD, chptr 18

• "The land seemed scorching to his feet"

-MD, chptr 23

• "Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs"

-MD, chptr 23

• "Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea"

-MD, chptr 23

• "Mood stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face, in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some might woe."

-MD, chptr 28

• "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me"

-MD, chptr 36

• "But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself."

-MD, chptr 36

• "They think me mad- Strabuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened!"

-MD, chptr 37

• "Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what will, one comfort's always left- that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestined."

-MD, chptr 39

• "Damn me, won't you dance?"

-MD, chptr 39

• "That anaconda of an old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!

-MD, chptr 40 (only interesting because Pip said it)

• "Yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Wale was not for mortal man. that to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into quick eternity."

-MD, chptr 41

• "Declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time)"

-MD chptr 41

• "Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him"

-MD, chptr 41

• "The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung."

-MD, chptr 41

• "what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulist being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee"

-MD, chptr 44

• "But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of his- these words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land."

-MD, chptr 48

• "There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair."

-MD, chptr 48

• [about Ahab] "I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."

-MD, chptr 50

• "Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one"

-MD, chptr 58

• "at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn."

-MD, chptr 61

• "it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nails geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-fois-gras."

-MD, chptr 65

• "Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it."

-MD, chptr 68

• "Oh, horrible vulturous of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free."

-MD, chptr 69

• "Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?"

-MD, chptr 69

• "Oh head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

-MD, chptr 70

• "O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom sirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind"

-MD, chptr 70

• "For unless you own the whale you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for provincials then?"

-MD, chptr 76

• "But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced... Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!"

--MD, chptr 85

• "My dear sir, i this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all."

-MD, chptr 85

• "Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."

-MD, chptr 85

• "For there is no foly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men."

-MD, chptr 87

• "I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it."

--MD, chptr 89

• "What is the great glob itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish too."

-MD, chptr 89

• "And thus there seems a reason in all things, even in law."

-MD, chptr 90

• "But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self i the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?"

-MD, chptr 93

• "the sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up but drowned the infinite of his soul”

-MD, chptr 93

• "The sun hides not... all the millions of miles of deserts and griefs beyond the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same."

-MD, chptr 96

• "And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth and the round world itself but an empty cipher except to sell by the cartload"

-MD, chptr 99

• "Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts."

-MD, chptr 99

• "or the Scales- happiness weighed and found wanting"

-MD, chptr 99

• "What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures."

-MD, chptr 100

• "only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly livingly found out."

-MD, chptr 103

• "Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child's play."

-MD, chptr 103

• "whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave"

-MD, chptr 106

• "take a high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates"

-MD, chptr 107

• "I'll order a complete man after a desirable pattern... no heart at all... shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards."

-MD, chptr 108

• "In they most solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers?"

-MD, chptr 108

• " I am proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers."

-MD, chptr 108

• "For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books."

-MD, chptr 110

• "for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness."

-MD, chptr 111

• "but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote"

-MD, chptr 111

• " Come hither, brokenhearted; here is another life without the guild of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them."

-MD, chptr 111

• "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar."

-MD, chptr 112

• "But Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation of the possibilities of the immense remote"

-MD, chptr 112

• "and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom , then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If."

-MD, chptr 114

• "Science! Curse thee, though vain toy; and curse be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven [the sun] whose live vividness but scorches him"

-MD, chptr 118

• "There he goes now; to him nothing's happend; but to me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world."

-MD, chptr 125

• "I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of they eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!"

-MD, chptr 125

• "ye velievers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does. yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude."

-MD, chptr 125

• "Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a jack-of-all-trades."

-MD, chptr 127

• "Faith? What's that?"

-MD, chptr127

• "From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop."

-MD, chptr 132

• "of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been... aye, aye! what a forty years' fool"

-MD, chptr 132

• "let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God."

-MD, chptr 132

• "And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their lifetimes aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumference of inferior souls."

-MD, chptr

• "and Ahab stands alone among the millions of peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!"

-MD, chptr 133

• " Gone?- gone? What means that little word?"

-MD, chptr 134

• "Were i the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world."

-MD, chptr 135

• "Therefore that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true.... The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows"

-MD, chptr 96

• "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

-MD, epilogue / Job

• "It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan."

-MD, epilogue

• "The difference between dogs and people is that dogs know how to be dogs."

-Peter Burke (?)

• "The sky I thought, is not so grand; / I 'most could touch it with my hand! / And reaching up my hand to try, / I screamed to feel it touch the sky"

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence

• "But, then again, everything is a sin."

-Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.'

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him"

- Exodus, 22:21 NIV (ahem immigration ahem)

• "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised."

- Job, 1:21 NIV

• "There the wicked cease from turmoil, and there the weary are at rest"

- Job 3:19 NIV (in death)

• "As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it."

- Job 4:8 NIV

• "Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker?... Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces; unnoticed, they perish forever."

-Job, 4:17

• "Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward."

-Job, 5:7

• "How useless to spread a net in full view of all the birds!"

- Proverbs 1:17

• "Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God"

- Mathew 4:4

• "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also"

- Mathew 6:21 "But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it" - Mathew 7:12

• "I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptist on a platter."

-Mark 6:25

• "He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen."

- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "And he knew no man was ever alone on the sea."

- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "Man is not much beside the great birds and beasts."

- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought."

- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "I wonder what a bone spur is, he thought. Maybe we have them without knowing of it."

- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?"

- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive."

- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

• "War will make corpses of us all."

-Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers

• “The right hand jealous of the left. The heart jealous of the soul!”

- Kate Chopin, The Awakening (14)

• "The past was nothing to her… the future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate… the present alone was significant, was hers”

- Kate Chopin, The Awakening (61)

• “She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth"

- Kate Chopin, The Awakening (89)

• "I've been busy working like a machine and feeling like a lost soul"

- Kate Chopin, The Awakening

• “The trouble is… that youth is given up to illusions”

- Kat Chopin, The Awakening

• "He had no faith in doctors, whom he called traffickers in other people's pain"

- The General in his Labyrinth (45)

• "Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (48)

• "There is great power in the irresistible force of love."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (58)

• "Superstitions are harder to uproot than love."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (60)

• "General: Don't tell me you've conquered nostalgia Wilson: On the contrary: nostalgia has conquered me... I'm at the mercy of a destiny that isn't mine."

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (67)

• "America is half a world gone mad."

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (71)

• "Attempting perhaps to reconstitute the splendor of long ago out of the ashes of his memories."

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (75)

• "Sir London Lyndsay was writing the memories that no one but him would remember"

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez,The General in his Labyrinth (79)

• "He could not remember anyone so sad who could still produce so much happiness around him... 'with ten men singing like you, we could save the world.'"

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (91)

• "...inhaling the heartbreaking aroma of days gone by until he lost his breath"

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (107)

• " 'Not even the stars escape the ruin of life, there are fewer now then there were 18 years ago' 'you're crazy' said the general 'no... I'm old, but I refuse to believe it.'"

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (129)

• "But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most.. he saw fireflies where there were none."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (137)

• "I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (149)

• "No matter whom I'm with I'll always be alone."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (177)

• "The only wars here will be civil wars, and those are like killing your mother."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (185)

• "It was typical of the General: at on moment he could not resist a voracious desire for the most unexpected objects or for men with no outstanding merits, and then, after a time, he had to drag them along with him, not knowing how to get rid of them."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (209)

• "I've become lost in a dream, searching for something that doesn't exist."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (221)

• "Go to Mexico, even if they ill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (224)

• "He became despondent at the sorrowful thought that everything of his would turn into goods for sale."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (237)

• "Fate had granted him the immense fortune of losing his memory."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (265)

• "I can remember everything. That's my curse, young man. It's the greatest curse that's ever been inflicted on the human race: memory."

-Leland, Citizen Kane

• "I don't have the good fortune to believe in the afterlife."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (267)

• "He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes ad his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness, 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'"

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (267)

• "the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in his Labyrinth (268)

• "People ask me all the time, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, it's easy."

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted (5)

• "Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from... Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco."

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted (6)

• "It was Jim Watson. I was happy to see him, because in the fifties, he had discovered the secret of life, and now perhaps, he would tell it to me... Was this the secret of life? Running away was the secret of life?"

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted (25)

• "the biggest No this side of suicide"

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted (42)

• "Our hospital was famous and had housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?... What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?"

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted (48)

• "When you're sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound."

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted (48)

• "The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom."

- Susanna Kaysen, Girl Interrupted (168)

• "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

-James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

• "I was like the rest of them now, I suspected, I wanted her to fit my image of her, wanted her back like she might have been, but I feared the truth of it was that she wanted to stay hidden, to live her own life beyond all those clutching desires."

-James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

• "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?

-Thornton Wilder, Our Town

• "I wish that you knew that when I said two sugars, actually I meant three"

-Kate Nash, Nicest Thing

• "I don't know if they're really like everybody else, or if they're just able to pretend they are. I try to pretend, but it isn't any help."

-Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• "But one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be."

-Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• " 'Meg has it tough,' Charles Wallace said. 'She's not really one thing or the other.'"

-Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• " 'Oh why must you make me look at unpleasant things when there are so many delightful ones to see?'...'There will no longer be so many pleasant things to look at if responsible people don't do something about the unpleasant ones.'"

-Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• "It's my worst trouble, getting fond. If I didn't get fond I could be happy all the time."

-Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• " 'But nobody's ever happy, either,' Meg said earnestly. 'Maybe if you aren't unhappy sometimes you don't know how to be happy.'"

-Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• “Who’s there?”

-Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 1 Sc 1

• "And I am sick at heart."

-Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 1 Sc 1

• “’Say what, is Horatio there?’ ‘A piece of him.’”

-Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 1 Sc 1

• “O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into dew” 29

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Frailty, thy name is woman!” 29

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “’He was a goodly king,’ ‘He was a man,’” 33

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “His greatness weighed, his will is not his own, for he himself is subject to his birth” 41

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “You speak like a green girl.” 45

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul, lends the tongue to vows. These blazes daughter, giving more light than heat, extinct in both even in their promise as it is a-making, you must not take for fire.” 47

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous, and we fools of nature so horridly to shake our disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?” 53

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” 67

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of” 97

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” 99

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” 99

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “A dream itself is but a shadow.” 99

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals- and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” 102

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a hand-saw.” 107

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “That I, the son of a dear father murdered, prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.” 119

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,”129

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Or if though wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.” 133

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” 135

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year.” 143

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Our wills and fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown, Our thoughts are ours, there ends none of our own.” 149

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” 151

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “’Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper…’ ‘Sir, I lack advancement.’” 157

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.” 159

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Never alone did the king sigh but with a general groan.” 163

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; words without thoughts never to heaven go.” 169

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “For use almost can change the stamp of nature.” 181

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “ ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.’ ‘What does thou mean by this?’ ‘Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.’” 197

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw, when honor’s at the stake. How stand I, then…” 203

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “O from this time forth, my thoughts be blood or be nothing worth!” 205

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Her speech is nothing, yet the unshaped use of it doth move the hearers to collection. They aim at it and botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;” 205

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be.” 207

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit! I dare damnation.” 215

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “O heavens, is ‘t possible a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?” 217

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “This nothings more than matter.” 217

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart?” 229

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “Has this fellow no feeling of his business? He sings in grave-making.” 243

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.” -Shakespeare, Hamlet 247
• “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O, that the earth which kept the world in awe should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s flaw!”

-Shakespeare, Hamlet 251

• “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” 259

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “But to know a man well were to know himself” 267

-Shakespeare, Hamlet

• “To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excrutiatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

• "She is looking at what she can remember, I believe; not at what is really present."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

• "Her soul sat on her lips."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

• "You have rather the look of another world."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

• "Most things freeborn will submit to anything for a salary."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

• "Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre. Remorse is the poison of life."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

• "The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely entrusted.. (the power) of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action 'let it be right'."

- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

• "All this happened, more or less."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "No art is possible without a dance with death, he wrote."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes... This one is a failure, and had to be, because it was written by a pillar of salt."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "He said that everything there was to know about life was in 'The Brothers Karamazov', by Feodor Dostoevsky. 'But that isn't enough any more,' he said."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, 'I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "How nice- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

• "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "And I hope she'll be a fool- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God- a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that- and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "Gatsy believe in the green light, the orgastic future that yar by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's not matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

• "to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "it brought him up against the more general failure of consumerism as an approach to human happiness."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?"

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun. As if too-intimate knowledge of any interior were necessarily harmful knowledge Were knowledge that could never be washed off."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "Maybe the floor became truly a floor only in his mental reconstruction of it... The suspicion that everything was relative. That the "real" and "authentic" might not be simply doomed but fictive to begin with. That his feeling of righteousness, of uniquely championing the real, was just a feeling..."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (272)

• "He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing chances except that you see things differently...isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experience before?"

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "I wonder if we're depressed because there's no frontier anymore. Because we can't pretend anymore there's place no one's been. I wonder if aggregate depression is on the rise, worldwide."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "He still managed a reasonably wicked laugh, but in the end of the struggle to hold fast to the trivial proved as desperate as any other."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from on perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "How can you distinguish people when everyone pretends to be the same?"

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself."

-Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

• "The road to happiness is paved with heartaches... and stones."

-Yankee Doodle Dandy

• "Freedom was easy-"

-Toni Morrison, Sula

• "And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous."

-Toni Morrison, Sula

• " 'You think I don't know what your life is like just because I ain't living it? I know what every colored women in this country is doing.' 'What's that?' 'Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I'm going down like one of those red woods. I sure did live in this world.'"

-Toni Morrison, Sula

• " 'How you know?' 'About what?' 'A bout who was good? How you know it was you?' 'What you mean?' 'I mean maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was me.'"

-Toni Morrison, Sula

• "The real hell of Hell is that it is forever."

-Toni Morrison, Sula

• "When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "How were we to know we were happy?"

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be full described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it... Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "How easy it is to invent humanity for anyone at all. What an available temptation."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "He was no longer a thing to me. That was the problem... It complicates."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "This is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "All I can hope for is reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "I make him an idol, a cardboard cutout."

-Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

• "Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire."

-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

• "as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "All the fraudulent dream of teenage appetites."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "some unvoiced idea that no matter what you did to its edges the true Pacific stayed inviolate and integrated or assume the ugliness at any edge into some more general truth."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "Despair came over her, as it will when nobody around has any sexual relevance to you."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "You know what a miracle is? Another world's intrusion into this one."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "This is America, you live in it, you let it happen."

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "But like the thought that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at the possibility directly, or in any but the most accident of lights. 'No,' she said, 'that's ridiculous.'"

-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

• "I will control myself, or go inside.

I will not flaw perfection with my grief. Handsome, this day: no matter who has died." -Edna St Vincent Millay “I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."

• "What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

• “Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

• “There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

• “Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

• "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality..."

-Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

• "But skeptics, believers, and good croquet players are harder to come by these days."

-Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

• "The things we love destroy us every time."

-George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

• "And I'd noticed how, with the Summer ending, and Labor Day approaching, all the adults would acquire a sort of desperate, clinging manner, as if this were all going to end forever, and the good times would never be seen again. Of course, I now realize that the end was just an excuse to party like maniacs."

-Charles D'Ambrosio, The Point

• "Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it."

-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

• "Walter, you're all washed up."

-Double Indemnity

• "I wish I knew how to quit you."

-Brokeback Mountain

• "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool."

-Almost Famous

• "The meaning of life is that it ends."

-Franz Kafka (?)

• “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

― Robert Frost

• "The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I'll concentrate on that for awhile."

-The Lady from Shanghai

• "It was his story against mine, but of course I told my story better."

-In a Lonely Place

• “The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”

-Karen Russel, Swamplandia!

• "The fact was that Mrs. Olinski did not know how she had chosen her team, and the further fact was that she didn't know that she didn't know until she did know. Of course, that is true of most things: you do not know up to and including the very last second before you do."

-E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday

• "She thought that maybe- just maybe- Western Civilization was in a decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock."

-E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday

• "What a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black."

-Stan Brakhage

• "The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."

-James Joyce, Ulysses

• “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”

― Joan Didion

• "The origin of suffering, as a noble truth, is this: It is the craving that produces renewal of being accompanied by enjoyment and lust, and enjoying this and that; in other words, craving for sensual desires, craving for being, craving for non-being."
• "He saw things in black and white. And black was evil."

-Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

• "There is no story that is not true."

-Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

• "And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man's mind. And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere."

-John Steinbeck, The Pearl

• "If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it. In any case, they say in the town that…"

-John Steinbeck, The Pearl

• "The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing. Always. It never stops. Sometimes not even after death."

-Marisha Pessl, Night Film

• "I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is."

-John Green, Paper Towns

• "You can love someone so much... But you can never love people as much as you can miss them."

-John Green

• "Every love story is a potential grief story."

-Julian Barnes

• "...They yearned for something. Some word from him that would rekindle the dream and stop the death they were dying."

-Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

• "One day it will please us to remember even this."

-Virgil, The Aeneid

• “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

-John Steinbeck

• “Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.”

― George Orwell, Animal Farm

• “I think we define one another for one another. We are not isolated creatures, popped into this world, who chart ourselves only by what’s in our head.”

-Robert Burt

• "Until we are sick, we understand not."

-Keats

• "The Hmong and I have a lot in common. I have an anarchist sub-personality. I don't like coercion. I also believe that the long way around is often the shortest way from Point A to Point B. And I'm not very interested in what is generally called the truth. In my opinion, consensual reality is better than facts."

-Anne Fadiman, "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down." pg. 95

• "But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

-Thornton Wilder, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey"

• "A new bridge of stone has been built in the place of the old, but the event has not been forgotten. It has passed into proverbial expressions. "I may see you Tuesday," say a Limean, "unless the bridge falls."

-Thornton Wilder, "The Bridge of San Luis Rey"

• "‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth."

-Foucault

• " 'That's how people live, Milt'- Michael Antoniou again, still kindly, gently- "by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? 'Tell me a story.' That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. And what story does the Church have to tell? That's easy. It's the greatest story ever told."

-Middle Sex

• "I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind- and all the worse for the fishes."

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

• “The chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness.”

― Arthur Conan Doyle

• "I kept thinking that Douglas was another of those liberals who loved humanity in the abstract, but couldn’t stand people in particular." (602)

-Kluger, Simple Justice

• "“I love mankind,” he said, “but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams,” he said, “I often went so far to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me,” he said. “On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov,

• "...Well-read people are less likely to be evil."

-Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope

• “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

-Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (referenced in Netflix ASOUE)

• "Depression is stupid and not a thing that makes me a better writer. Fuck your Bukowskisms. I want sunlight and love and running down some street I’ve never been on where it’s warm and cool at the same time and I’m smiling. I want nothing to ever be bad again- and I don’t mean that I want a life free of conflict, I mean that I want a life free of meaningless conflict. Not being able to will oneself to take a shower or leave the house is meaningless."

-Joshua Espinoza