jacques prévert

• i recognized happiness by the noise it made when it left.

the catcher in the rye

• poets are always taking the weather so personally. they're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

edgar allan poe

• we gave the future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.

heart of darkness

• droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
• no, i don't like work. i had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. i don't like work - no man does - but i like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. your own reality - for yourself, not for others - what no other man can ever know. they can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
• we live, as we dream - alone...
• there is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what i hate and detest in the world - what i want to forget.

something wicked this way comes

• oh god, midnight's not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, on or two's not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning's not bad there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon. but three, now, christ, three a.m.! the blood moves slow. you're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying.
• sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin.
• too late, i found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.
• death makes everything else sad. but death itself only scares. if there wasn't death, all the other things wouldn't get tainted.
• we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long.
• we are the creatures that know and know too much. that leaves us with such a burden again we have no choice, to laugh or cry.
• death doesn't exist. it never did, it never will. but we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. all it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. nothing.
• life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp.
• what's happening? i know what's happening. i don't know what's happening? what!?

macbeth

• it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.