• "I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• "Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like."

Lemony Snicket

• “She was dressed in a white little gown that came just below her knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink bare fewet scattered the dew before them as she came. She was younger than John- not more than sixteen. "Hello," she cried softly, "I’m Kismine." She was much more than that to John already.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond As Big As The Ritz

• "We made blueberry, buttermilk... and if you're feeling especially sinful, chocolate chip."

Seth Cohen, The OC

• "Vous au moins, vous ne risquez pas d'être un légume, puisque même un artichaut a du cœur." (At least you'll never be a vegetable — even artichokes have hearts.)

Amelie Poulain, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain

• "No one is free even the birds are chained to the sky."

Bob Dylan

• "So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall."

Roald Dahl

• When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn’t acting. It’s following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that. So the director’s task is just that – to direct, to point the way. Then the actor takes over. And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.

James Dean

• "Gomez, last night, you were unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me. Do it again!"

Morticia, The Addams Family

• "I know better than to argue romance with a French woman."

Will Bloom, Big Fish

• "Unfortunately we live in a society where they tell us we have to look a certain way, so we're all under pressure to live up to unrealistic expectations."

George Feeny, Boy Meets World

• "In films, we are trained by the American way of movie-making to think we must understand and 'get' everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don't understand each atom of the potato!"

Jean-Luc Godard

• "Just like any woman, we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same."

Francesca Lia Block

• "Royal Tenenbaum's epitaph: Royal O'Reilly Tenenbaum 1932-2001 Died Tragically Rescuing His Family From The Wreckage Of A Destroyed Sinking Battleship"

The Royal Tenenbaums

• "Je ne suis la belette de personne." (I'm nobody's little weasel.)

Amelie Poulain, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain

• "Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear."

Lemony Snicket

• "Sophie was back in the game! Pure, raw, explosive pleasure! Better than drugs, better than smack! Better than a dope-coke-crack-fix-shit-shoot-sniff-ganja-marijuana-blotter-acid-ecstasy! Better than sex, head, 69, orgies, masturbation, tantrism, Kama Sutra or Thai doggy-style! Better than banana milkshakes! Better than George Lucas' trilogy, the muppets and 2001! Better than Emma Peel, Marilyn, Lara Croft and Cindy Crawford's beauty mark! Better than the B-side to Abbey Road, Jimmy Hendrix and the first man on the moon! Space Mountain, Santa Claus, Bill Gates' fortune, the Dalai Lama, Lazarus raised from the dead! Schwarzenegger's testosterone shots, Pam Anderson's lips! Woodstock, raves... Better than Sade, Rimbaud, Morrison and Castaneda! Better than freedom, better than life!"

Julien Jeanvier, Jeux d'Enfants

• "How can you measure acting in inches?"

James Dean

• "A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

Roald Dahl

• "I must say, I am trying to live my life with a sharpie marker approach. You can’t erase the strokes you’ve made, but each step is much bolder and more deliberate."

Dianna Agron

• "People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes."

Neil Gaiman

• "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."

Jean-Luc Godard

• "Ma petite Amélie, vous n'avez pas des os en verre. Vous pouvez vous cogner à la vraie vie. Si vous laissez passer cette chance, alors avec le temps, c'est votre coeur qui va devenir aussi sec et cassant que mon squelette. Alors, allez-y, nom d'un chien!" (My dear Amelie, you don't have bones fragile like glass. You can throw yourself against real life. If you do not seize this opportunity, then after a while, your heart will become as dry and breakable as my bones. So go ahead, dammit!)

The Glass Man, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain

• "I believe that when you find love, you hold on to it and cherish it because there is nothing finer, and it may never come again."

George Feeney, Boy Meets World

• "Look, other bands, they want to make it about sex or pain, but you know, The Beatles, they had it all figured out, okay? "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The first single. It's effing brilliant, right? That's what everybody wants, Nicky. They don't want a twenty-four-hour hump sesh, they don't want to be married to you for a hundred years. They just want to hold your hand."

Thom, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

• "Les temps sont durs pour les rêveurs." (Times are hard for dreamers.)

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain

• If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

Louis Armstrong

• "If I broke your heart last night / it's because I love you most of all."

You Always Hurt the One You Love, The Mills Brothers

• "What's wrong with killing? Everybody's got their reasons."

Mitsuko, Battle Royale

• "My heart belongs to daddy."

Marilyn Monroe

• "Miss Stubbs: You seem to be old and wise. Jenny: I feel old. But not very wise."

An Education

• "I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success."

Ernest Hemingway

• "We based the look on rock 'n roll right from the beginning."

Vivenne Westwood

• "There's a lotta things about me you don't know anything about, Dottie. Things you wouldn't understand. Things you couldn't understand."

Pee-Wee Herman, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

• "People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good."

Edith Piaf

• "It's like I was playing some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up."

Benjamin Braddock, The Graduate

• "You do your thing and I'll do mine. You are you and I am I. And, if, in the end, we end up together, it's beautiful."

Topanga Lawrence, Boy Meets World

• "Whoever sent us down here was smart, you know? Because they sent us together, and as long as we stick together, we're gonna make it."

Michael Guerin, Roswell

• "Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."

Maurice Sendak

• "Cute is when your personality shines through your looks. Like, when you see someone’s personality in the way they walk and you just feel like hugging them every time you see them."

Natalie Portman

• "Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations."

Vladimir Nabokov

• "Child: Why do you hold flowers when you sing? Morrissey: Why do I hold flowers because I think flowers are very beautiful things, very nice and innocent things, they don't harm anybody, they don't burp, and they don't do anything ugly, so why not? It's better I think than waving socks about."
• "Have you ever had a moment when you’re with the one person in the world that you want to be with and the wind is blowing through your hair and the song that describes your entire soul happens to come on and the person that you happen to want to be with happens to love the same song and suddenly you realize you’re listening to it together? And that no matter how crazy your life has gotten there’s this one moment, this perfect moment where you could just say that no matter what happens nothing can take this moment away from me. And then something does."

Liz Parker, Roswell

• "Do you think I’m wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it’s only noon. You couldn’t be something that hundreds of others are."

Jonathan Safran Foer

• "John: Why didn't God make me Elvis Presley? Julia: Because he was saving you to be John Lennon."

Nowhere Boy

• "I am 30, but there are things about me that are still 15."

Brigitte Bardot

• "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 Poet’s Society

• "I once hand made a girlfriend a 50 page leather bound book. It was an illustrated fairy tale about a princess and an eccentric magician. The magician had his heart broken so badly in the past that instead of keeping it in his chest where it could easily get hurt again, he kept it locked up in a rusty trunk under his bed, where it had withered into a shriveled apricot. A lot happens that can’t really be summed up in one paragraph, but at the end, his apricot heart swells to the size of a house and they end up living happily ever after inside of it. It took me about a month to make, it was all rhyming, hand painted… something I was pretty gosh darn proud of. I really poured a lot into it, and I think its filled with some of my best paintings yet. Sadly in real life the story didnt end as happy as it did in the book. Lets just say I’m living alone in that giant apricot heart at the moment."

Matthew Gray Gubler

• "Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowded room with boring people than I feel on my own."

Henry Rollins

• "One of the world's most tiresome questions is what object one would bring to a desert island, because people always answer "a deck of cards" or "Anna Karenina" when the obvious answer is "a well equipped boat and a crew to sail me off the island and back home where I can play all the card games and read all the Russian novels I want."

Lemony Snicket

• "I like Math because there's only one right answer."

Brendan Fehr

• "Paris is my favorite place in the world. I've never been there, at all... But I wanna live there, even though I've never been."

Elle Fanning

• "I don't love studying. I hate studying. I like learning, learning is beautiful."

Natalie Portman

• "Fondest memory of being a Beatle: Having three brothers."

Ringo Starr

• "Some of you young folks been saying to me, "Hey Pops, what you mean 'What a wonderful world'? How about all them wars all over the place? You call them wonderful? And how about hunger and pollution? That aint so wonderful either." Well how about listening to old Pops for a minute. Seems to me, it aint the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be better. That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying."

Louis Armstrong

• "It must have been the lack of nutrients that gave my father his temper. He is not a sweet man despite a very sweet tooth."

Nigel Slater, Toast

• "We must get over wanting to be needed—this is the hardest of all temptations to resist."

C.S. Lewis

• "I don’t really care about making a big movie — I just want to make good ones."

Mélanie Laurent

• "I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."

Jonathan Safran Foer

• "Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilightseries. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

Rosemary Urquico

• "A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

Bob Dylan

• "I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again."

Lewis Carroll

• "Going to the woods is going home."

John Muir

• "My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence."

Edith Sitwell

• "Remember, we’re madly in love, so it’s all right to kiss me anytime you feel like it."

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

• "Books can be possessive, can’t they? You’re walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what’s inside will change your life, but sometimes you don’t even have to read it. Sometimes it’s a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven’t even had their spines cracked. ‘Why do you buy books you don’t even read?’ our daughter asks us. That’s like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course."

Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

• "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

Cicero

• "The other day I was down by the Hudson River, and I see two nuns in full habit rollerblading down the street holding hands. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I get it. The world is surreal and beautiful. And everything is fine."

Regina Spektor

• "You know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit."

Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

• "To be with another woman, that is French. To be caught, that is American."

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

• “Predictable doesn’t always mean boring. Lust doesn’t always mean love. Near doesn’t always mean close. New doesn’t always mean exciting. Different doesn’t always mean better. Far doesn’t always mean distant. Knowing everything doesn’t make you wise. Knowing the truth doesn’t make you superior. Knowing your problem doesn’t solve it. Sitting between your past and your future, doesn’t always mean you’re in the present.”

Dakota Skye

• "I laughed and said, life is easy. What I meant was, life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again."

Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

• "Everyone, deep down within, carries a small cemetery of those he has loved."

Romain Rolland

• "I’d have children just to play hide and seek with them."

Cassie Ainsworth

• “If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he and I was I.”

Montaigne

• "I say fall. Fall hard. Fall in love with whomever that person is, wherever they are--office, grocery store, wherever. It hurts. For sure it hurts not to be loved in return, but it's love right? It's worth it. Especially when it works out. In my mind, it is absolutely, unquestionably worth the attempt to just...see."

TJ Thyne

• "I just reread Romeo & Juliet and you know the first thing I realized is that, that’s not even the title. It’s called the Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet. They die. She’s this young girl, she’s younger than me and she dies. Look, I think the reason why people think that it’s such a romantic play is because they don’t know what it’s like to be put in that position. But when your life and other peoples’ lives are put at risk, there isn’t anything romantic about it."

Liz Parker, Roswell

• "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

• "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be today."

Lawrence Krauss

• “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life. It goes on. "

Robert Frost

• "I guess it’s cause I was sitting in a deli and reading Dorian Gray and a guy comes up to me and asked me about it and now he’s my husband."

Summer Finn, (500) Days of Summer

• “Love me less but love me for a long time”

Ismael, Les Chansons d’Amour

• “So I think I’m falling in love… involuntarily blessed with something people spend their entire lives searching for. Lucky me.”

Dakota Skye

• "Ooh Mister Todd, I'm so happy. I can eat you up, I really could."

Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

• “The way you’re moving in your sleep, the way you look before you leap, the strange illusions that you keep. You don’t know, but I’m noticing.”

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

• “Happiness is a hot chocolate on a cold day.”

Nana, Bokura Ga Ita

• “If people die the moment that they graduate, then surely it’s the things we do beforehand that count.”

Jenny Mellor, An Education

• “If you wake up in the morning, and you can’t think of anything but singing first, then you’re supposed to be a singer.”

Dolores, Sister Act 2

• "No matter how bad things get, it’s impossible not to love someone who made you toast. Once you’ve been through that crusty surface to the soft underneath and tasted the warm, salty butter you’ll last forever."

Nigel Slater, Toast

• "She wished she had a little yellow house of her own, with a flower box full of real flowers and herbs – pansies and rosemary – and a sweet lover who would swing dance with her in the evenings and cook pasta and read poetry aloud."

Francesca Lia Block

• "London is a city where everything starts. It’s also a city full of secrets, from the beautiful backstreets of Spitalfields to the storage facilities of the V&A. It’s a great place to get lost and that’s inspiring."

Erdem Moragliou

• “So what you’re telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again, but this time for the rest of my life? This whole stupid country is bored! There is no life in it, or color, or fun! It’s probably just as well the Russians are going to drop a nuclear bomb on us any day now. So my choice is to do something hard and boring, or to marry my… Jew and go to Paris and Rome and listen to jazz.”

Jenny Mellor, An Education

• "Wait / They don't love you like I love you."

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Maps

• "Scars are stories, history written on the body"

Kathryn Harrison

• "All logic is gone. Here were my plans last night - finish my shift, dinner with the parents, half hour of talking to Maria on the phone, then dive into this issue I've been having with geometry, and hopefully finish in time to watch this A&E biography on Madame Curie. Instead, I took off in an open-air vehicle that probably shouldn't be allowed on the road to begin with, broke into a house, essentially stole things from it, and engaged in general bonding with aliens. Welcome to my world."

Liz Parker, Roswell

• "On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

Lewis Carroll

• "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep."

Robert Frost

• "There are days when everything seems wrong, when little things just irk you for no good reason. And then there are days like today when the whole world just sings to you from the minute you open your eyes in the morning, till the minute you shut them again at night, days when you actually enjoy cleaning the milk shake machine."

Liz Parker, Roswell

• "Cats know everything - they just won't tell."

Melinda Metz, Roswell High #3

• Amandine: Where's the boss? Lucien: Ssh. Sleeping in the cauliflower.

Le Fabuleux Destin D'Amelie Poulain

• "Oh! Quelles belles jambes!"

Posner, The History Boys

• "Life's funny. To a kid, time always drags. Suddenly you're fifty. All that's left of your childhood fits in a rusty little box."

Dominique Brotodeau, Le Fabuleux Destin D'Amelie Poulain

• "I'm just a little bit, little bit in love with you. If you're a little bit, little bit in love with me."

Lenka

• "There's no individuality on the red carpet. That's why I loved Björk's Oscar swan dress. I wish I had the courage."

Keira Knightley

• "I realised that since I was a child I wanted to be an actress just to dress up in big fabrics and corsets and have adventures riding horses with lots of blood and action!"

Clemence Poesy

• "I never wear pigtails, I wear plaits."

Emma Watson

• "I like to play roles different from myself so I can hide behind them."

Charlotte Gainsbourg

• "I'm very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There's nothing so beautiful."

Michael Gambon

• "The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15."

Robert Caro

• "If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."

Oscar Wilde

• "I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."

Groucho Marx

• "There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."

Marcel Proust

• "Every day is an opportunity to fall or hurt yourself."

Dianna Agron

• "I once gave a girl a bloody fake ear in a Tiffany jewlery box with a letter that said, “Will you Gogh to prom with me?” Yeah, I guess I’m a romantic."

Matthew Gray Gubler

• "My mom told me when I get compliments to cover my ears."

Zooey Deschanel

• "I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people."

Charles Bukowski

• "On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• "Dreams are nothing more than wishes / and a wish is just a dream you wish to come true."

Harry Nilsson, The Puppy Song

• "I like bangs because they are cute."

Zooey Deschanel

• "Stéphanie: Okay, then lets have a date or something and we can talk about things if thats whats you want. Stephane: Whats the point? You’ll just want me as your friend and then you’ll have a really nice boyfriend and that will kill me."

The Science of Sleep

• "Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands and the rest of you, if you'd just rattle your jewelry."

John Lennon