• “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.” -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "My Lolita remarked: “You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me…that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "Some way further across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower than my heart: the outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full second or so, into emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made out as a latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made shadowgraphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "My car is limping, Dolores Haze,

And the last long lap is the hardest, And I shall be dumped where the weed decays, And the rest is rust and stardust." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)

• "This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which…might be called “Dolores Disparue,” there would be little sense in analyzing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "What I feared most was not that she might ruin me, but that she might accumulate sufficient cash to run away. I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• "There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita)." -_Vladimir Nabokov_ (__Lolita__)
• “We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.” -_Charles Bukowski_
• "It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "I walk onto the blazing sunshine. the whole day is mine - temporarily, anyhow." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire…. Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It’s real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you’ve suddenly become an idiot. There’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "in this room the hours of love still make shadows." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice" -_Charles Bukowski_
• "Careful poetry and careful people last only long enough to die safely." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad." -_Jonathan Safran Foer_ (__Everything Is Illuminated__)
• "Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch or you might simply get covered in sap and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors where it is harder to get a splinter." -_Lemony Snicket_
• "I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying." -_Oscar Wilde_
• "After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." -_Albus Dumbledore_
• "Until you can create something that captivates people, I’d invite you to just shut up. It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one." -_Chuck Palahniuk_
• "Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child." -_Jack Kerouac_
• "In certain situations, replying ‘nothing’ when asked what one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it is as it were the first sign of absurdity." -_Albert Camus_
• "Going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that." -_Ernest Hemingway_ (__The Sun Also Rises__)
• "So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them." -_Sylvia Plath_
• "There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself! " -_Hermann Hesse_
• "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." -_Friedrich Nietzsche_
• "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." -_Franz Kafka_
• "I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That’s the two categories. The horrible are like, I don’t know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don’t know how they get through life. It’s amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you’re miserable, because that’s very lucky, to be miserable." -_Woody Allen_ (__Annie Hall__)
• "Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library." -_Haruki Murakami_
• "It’s everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid, necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless—and sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way." -_J.D. Salinger_ (__Franny and Zooey__)
• "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." -_Oscar Wilde_
• "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And of course stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand." -_Aldous Huxley_
• "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." -_F. Scott Fitzgerald_ (__The Great Gatsby__)
• "Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present." -_John Green_ (__Looking For Alaska__)
• "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." -_Jack Kerouac_ (__On the Road__)
• "A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded." -_Lemony Snicket_
• "Let’s borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained." -_F. Scott Fitzgerald_ (__Tender is the Night__)
• "If you can wake up in a different place. If you can wake up in a different time. Why can’t you wake up as a different person?" -_Chuck Palahniuk_ (__Fight Club__)
• "What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a perfection he’d made himself. And a moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection." -_Chuck Palahniuk_ (__Fight Club__)
• "One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple." -_Jack Kerouac_
• "Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love." -_Fyodor Dostoevsky_ (__The Brothers Karamazov__)
• "One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant." -_Lemony Snicket_
• "Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights." -_Virginia Woolf_
• "The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they’ll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don’t like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they’ll say he’s conceited. Even smart girls do it." -_J.D. Salinger_
• "Old photographs are very deceiving. They give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it’s not true. The person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognize him or herself in us. Who’s that looking at me so sadly, he or she would say." -_Jose Saramago_
• "She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together." -_J.D. Salinger_
• "I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry, you will someday." -_American Beauty_
• "Thou shalt not fail as a writer

because the very act of writing is the best protection from the madness of the world." -_Charles Bukowski_

• "I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction—every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour." -_Sylvia Plath (__The Bell Jar__)
• "Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like." -_Lemony Snicket_
• "When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people, and if you could keep from making engagements, the day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself." -_Ernest Hemingway (__A Moveable Feast__)
• "You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil." -_Ernest Hemingway (__A Moveable Feast__)
• "The area dividing the brain and the soul Is affected in many ways by experience — Some lose all mind and become soul: insane. Some lose all soul and become mind: intellectual. Some lose both and become: accepted." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "E-books aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry." -_Ray Bradbury_
• "I think I’d most like to spend a day with Harry. I’d take him out for a meal and apologise for everything I’ve put him through." -_J.K. Rowling_
• "Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within." -_Sigmund Freud_
• "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" -_Albus Dumbledore_
• "Just because something is typed - whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book - this does not mean that it is true." -_Lemony Snicket_
• "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." -_Ernest Hemingway_
• "When I’m 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I’ll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, “After all this time?” And I will say, “Always."" -_Alan Rickman_
• "The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create." -_Chuck Palahniuk_
• "Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me...As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate." -_Albert Camus (__The Stranger__)
• "Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced." -_Aldous Huxley_
• "She was at a loss for words. One wish? Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at the windowpane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears." -_Haruki Murakami_ (__Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman__)
• "In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars." -_F. Scott Fitzgerald_ (__The Great Gatsby__)
• "Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too." -_Lemony Snicket_
• "There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself." -_Hermann Hesse_
• "We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them." -_Jeffrey Eugenides_ (__The Virgin Suicides__)
• "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." -_Albert Camus_
• "The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose." -_Woody Allen_ (__Match Point__)
• "L’enfer, c’est les autres." -_Jean-Paul Sartre_
• "We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever." -_Jeffrey Eugenides_ (__Middlesex__)
• "I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited." -_Sylvia Plath_
• "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it’s yours." -_Ayn Rand_
• "The more one talks, the less the words mean." -_Jean-Luc Godard_ (__Vivre Sa Vie__)
• "It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the right point in a conversation to say goodbye." -_Haruki Murakami_
• "So I wait for you like a lonely house

Till you will see me again and live in me Till then my windows ache." -_Pablo Neruda_

• "I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic." -_Charles Bukowski_ (__Ham On Rye__)
• "Whenever we saw Mrs. Lisbon we looked in vain for some sign of the beauty that must have once been hers. But the plump arms, the brutally cut steel-wool hair, and the librarian’s glasses foiled us every time. We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn’t come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons, or on Sundays when the family drove in their paneled station wagon to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on the Lake. On those mornings Mrs. Lisbon assumed a queenly iciness. Clutching her good purse, she checked each daughter for signs of makeup before allowing her to get in the car, and it was not unusual for her to send Lux back inside to put on a less revealing top. None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, bursting with their fructifying flesh." -_Jeffrey Eugenides_ (__The Virgin Suicides__)
• "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was." -_Ernest Hemingway_
• "Almost all people are dumb. Ever seen people go into a restaurant to order food? They don’t even want to eat food. They come in because it’s time to eat. They’re not even hungry. The more I think of humanity, the less I want to think of them." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed. " -_Friedrich Nietzsche
• "I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!" -_Lewis Carroll_ (__Alice In Wonderland__)
• "Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." -_e.e.cummings_
• "False morality is the disease of a people who are told what to think and how to act from an early beginning." -_Charles Bukowski_
• "Son-of-a-bitch, a man was born to struggle for every inch of ground. Born to struggle, born to die.

I though about that. And thought about that.

Then I leaned back in my chair, took a good drag on my cigarette and blew an almost perfect smoke ring." -_Charles Bukowski_ (__Pulp__)

• "I mean, say that you figure that everything is senseless, then it can’t be quite senseless because you are aware that it’s senseless and your awareness of senselessness almost gives it sense. You know what I mean?" -_Charles Bukowski_ (__Pulp__)
• "Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination, and they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise the the rock of the world was founded on a fairy’s wing." -_F. Scott Fitzgerald_ (__The Great Gatsby__)
• "the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced,

and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. The most terrible thing about life is finding it gone." -_Charles Bukowski_

• "Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on." -_Kurt Vonnegut_
• "Lyndon Johnson is a politician, you know the ethics those guys have. It’s like a notch underneath child molester." -_Woody Allen_ (__Annie Hall__)
• "The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense." -_Jane Austen_ (__Pride and Prejudice__)
• “Spaghetti strands are a craft bunch, and I couldn’t let them out of my sight. If I were to turn my back, they might well slip over the edge of the pot and vanish into the night. Like the tropical jungle waits to swallow up colorful butterflies into the eternity of time, the night lay in silence, hoping to waylay the prodigal strands.” -_Haruki Murakami_
• "We’d often go to the movies. We’d shiver as the screen lit up. But more often, Madeline and I would be disappointed. More often we’d be disappointed. The images flickered. Marilyn Monroe looked terribly old. It saddened us. It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts, the film we wanted to make… and secretly wanted to live." -_Jean-Luc Godard_ (__Masculin Feminin__)
• "Someday, when they demonstrate that the world has four dimensions instead of just three, a man will be able to go for a walk and just disappear. No burial, no tears, no illusions, no heaven or hell. People will be sitting around and they’ll say, “What happened to George?” And somebody will say, “Well, I don’t know. He said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes.’" -_Charles Bukowski_
• "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that." -_Albus Dumbledore_
• "So it goes." -_Kurt Vonnegut_