• "the question is not what you look at but what you see."

henry david thoreau

• "i realised these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road."

jack kerouac

• "adults are like, this mess of sadness and phobias."

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

• "the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘awww!’"

jack kerouac

• "i’d like to think young people don’t really believe facebook and twitter is better than sitting in a forest at dusk listening to the sounds."

thom yorke

• "the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us"

a letter from franz kafka to oskar pollak

• "he was finding it hard to decide whether he wanted company or not; whenever he was in company he wanted to get away and whenever he was alone he wanted company"

j.k. rowling

• "i sometimes fall into the trap of doing what i think i should be doing rather than what i want to be doing."

björk

• "he pleaded so much that he lost his voice. his bones began to fill with words"

gabriel garcía márquez

• "and i asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

kurt vonnegut

• "it seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream."

f. scott fitzgerald

• "upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave macondo, that they forget everything he had taught then about the world and the human heart, that they shit on horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end."

gabriel garcía márquez

• "‎so avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. a man is not very tired, he is exhausted. don’t use very sad, use morose. language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays."

john keating (dead poets society)

• "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. we would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. if we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."

arthur conan doyle

• "language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and glory of the world. to deconstruct. to dismiss. she said, people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is."

chuck palahniuk

• "normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

ellen goodman

• "i am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires."

f. scott fitzgerald

• “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."

chuck palahniuk

• "every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, i want to tie the two arms together, and walk out of the bank carrying time in bags."

robert bly

• "everything has a purpose, even machines. clocks tell the time, trains take you places. they do what they're meant to do...maybe that's why broken machines make me so sad, they can't do what they're meant to do. maybe it's the same with people. if you lose your purpose, it's like you're broken."

hugo

• "develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. forget yourself."

henry miller

• "how happy is the blameless vestal's lot! the world forgetting, by the world forgot. eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd."

alexander pope (used in eternal sunshing of the spotless mind)

• "we are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams."

arthur o'shaughnessy (used in willy wonka and the chocolate factory)