- “It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.” Ian McEwan (Atonement)
- “You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always think of you.” J.M. Barrie
- “Never say goodbye, because saying goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.” J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan)
- “Being alone, it can be quite romantic, like Jacques Cousteau underneath the Atlantic.” Andrew Bird
- “We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.” The Breakfast Club
- “There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letter. I could be their leader.” Charlie Brown
- “Forever is composed of nows.” Emily Dickinson
- Fo Black lived on Canal Street, which used to be a real canal. He didn’t speak very good English, because he hadn’t left Chinatown since he came from Taiwan, because there was no reason for him to. The whole time I talked to him I imagined water on the other side of the window, like we were in an aquarium. He offered me a cup of tea, but I didn’t really feel like it, but I drank it anyway, to be polite. I asked him did he really love New York or was he just wearing the shirt. He smiled, like he was nervous. I could tell he didn’t understand, which made me feel guilty for speaking English, for some reason. I pointed at his shirt. “Do? You? Really? Love? New York?” He said, “New York?” I said, “Your. Shirt.” He looked at his shirt. I pointed at the N and said “New,” and the Y and said “York.” He looked confused, or embarrassed, or surprised, or maybe even mad. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, because I couldn’t speak the language of his feeling. “I not know was New York. In Chinese, ny mean ‘you’. Thought was ‘I love you.’” It was then that I noticed the “I♥NY” poster on the wall, and the “I♥NY” flag over the door, and the “I♥NY” dishtowels, and the “I♥NY” lunchbox on the kitchen table. I asked him, “Well, then why do you love everybody so much?" Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.” Neil Gaiman
- “And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall toward the center of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving toward us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.” Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Nighttime)
- “And I will die, and you will die, and we all will die, and even the stars will fade out one after another in time.” Jack Kerouac
- “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” Jack London
- “If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you.” Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne
- “Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowed room with boring people than I feel on my own.” Henry Rollins
- “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” J.D. Salinger (the Catcher in the Rye)
- “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.” Dr. Seuss
- “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” Kurt Vonnegut
- “In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken away from you.” Oscar Wilde
- “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” Roald Dahl
- “I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.” W. H. Auden
- “Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.” Calvin & Hobbes
- “Vous au moins, vous ne risquez pas d'être un légume, puisque même un artichaut a du cœur.” Amélie Poulain
- “On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.” David Bowie
- “If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.” Lemony Snicket
- “Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “There’s not much difference between music and magic.” Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- “Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
- Crying doesn't indicate that you're weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you're alive.
- “What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they play the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which would be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “Not all those who wander are lost.” J. R. R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)
- “Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. 'Pooh?' he whispered. 'Yes, Piglet?' 'Nothing,' said Piglet, taking Pooh's hand. 'I just wanted to be sure of you.” A. A. Milne
- “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” Douglas Adams
- “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” Douglas Adams
- “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Douglas Adams
- Franz Kafka is Dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)
- “Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues; you can tell by the way she smiles.” Bob Dylan
- “In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “My witness is the empty sky.” Jack Kerouac
- “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” Oscar Wilde
- “Without music, life would be a mistake.” Friedrich Nietzsche
- “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Dr. Seuss
- “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.” Vincent van Gogh
- “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”
- “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.” Friedrich Nietzsche
- “People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look and it’s magic.” Andy Warhol
- “I want people to know that almost everything that concerns them in their daily lives is of no consequence whatsoever. Nothing and nobody is really important, so people, realising that, should get on with their lives, go mad, take their clothes off, jump in the canal, jump into one of those supermarket trolleys, race ‘round the supermarket and steal Mars bars and, y’know, kiss kittens and sit on the back of bread vans. Whatever makes people happy they should just do it, ‘cos time is a mere scratch and life is nothing.” Morrissey
- “Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.” Anthony de Mello
- “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” Woody Allen
- “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.” Lawrence Krauss
- “Do I love you because you’re beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II
- “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” Sir Paul McCartney
- “I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “I love child things because there’s so much mystery when you’re a child. When you’re a child, something as simple as a tree doesn’t make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow — you haven’t got a handle on the rules when you’re a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.” David Lynch
- “I’m so afraid of losing something I love, that I refuse to love anything.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close)
- “You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” Dr. Seuss
- “Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” John Lennon
- “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".” Cutter, The Prestige
- “Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.” Douglas Adams
- “In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.” Douglas Adams
- “I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.” Woody Allen
- “My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.” Woody Allen
- “You know Miles does odd things sometimes. Once he wanted a man with a long beard to drink tea with him and he sent down to the casting agency for one, and drank tea with him all afternoon.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” Vincent van Gogh
- “Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.” Lemony Snicket
- “We read to know that we are not alone.” C.S. Lewis
- “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” Oscar Wilde
- “Time you enjoy wasting is never wasted.” John Lennon
- “Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth.” Mark Twain
- “Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.” Lauren Bacall
- “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” Henri Matisse
- “If you haven’t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful.” Sophia Loren
- “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” Stephen King
- “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” Dr. Seuss
- “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” C.S. Lewis
- “If you want to be happy, be.” Leo Tolstoy
- “Always be a little kinder than necessary.” James M. Barrie
- “'Where should one use perfume?' a young woman asked. 'Wherever one wants to be kissed,' I said.” Coco Chanel
- “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Martin Luther King Jr.
- “The heart is forever inexperienced.” Henry David Thoreau
- “People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.” Claude Monet
- “They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that’s true. What they don’t tell you is that when it starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up.” Big Fish
- “I want to keep on pretending, until the end, with you.” Finding Neverland
- “I've always known I'd be a bank robber. So judge all you want, ladies and gentlemen. Because you never did become an astronaut” Joey Comeau
- “I dreamed you were a cosmonaut of the space between our chairs and I was a cartographer of the tangles in your hair.” Andrew Bird
- “While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.” Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
- “We must leave this terrifying place tomorrow and go searching for sunshine.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “And those that were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I’d like to be 6, because it’s marvellous to be 6, because you’re not aware of your own mortality. You think you’re the center of the universe, days last 100 years, it’s always summer, you can put your head in some custard and no one cares.” Arthur Smith
- “It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” Charles Dickens
- “We live our lives in anticipation of the next hit of experience as if the one that’s coming will finally do it for us. What’s so strange is that nothing up ‘til now has brought that sense of real completion or fulfillment. So why are we so seduced into thinking that the next one will?” Joseph Goldstein
- 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.
- “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” Franz Kafka
- “He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.” Franz Kafka in a letter to Max Brod, 1922
- “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
- “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
- “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.” Lemony Snicket
- “Enthusiasts are used to being mocked, maligned and misunderstood. We don’t really mind.” Stephen Fry (The Fry Chronicles)
- “Well… um… big question, but, to me Van Gogh is the finest painter in the world. Certainly the most popular, great painter of all time. The most beloved, his command of color most magnificent. He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provenance was not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.” Bill Nighy in Doctor Who
- “[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.” Ray Bradbury (Farewell Summer: A Novel)
- “Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.” Virginia Woolf
- “Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.” Plato
- “She said she knew she was able to fly because when she came down she always had dust on her fingers from touching the light bulbs.” J.D. Salinger
- “It was November—the month of crimson sunsets, parting birds, deep, sad hymns of the sea, passionate wind-songs in the pines.” L.M. Montgomery
- “For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” Vincent van Gogh
- “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
- “Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.” Oscar Wilde
- “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life.” Oscar Wilde
- “The cigars are ballast, sweetheart. Sheer ballast. If he didn’t have a cigar to hold on to, his feet would leave the ground. We’d never see our Zooey again.” J. D. Salinger (Franny & Zooey)
- “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.” Roald Dahl
- “Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” Antoine de Saint-Expury (The Little Prince)
- “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)
- ‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’ Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)
- “Je ne suis pas infâme. Je suis une femme.” Angela (Une Femme est une Femme)
- “It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.” D.H. Lawrence
- “I’m going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.” Jack Kerouac
- “First love is unrequited ultimately because it’s so huge. It’s such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back. It’s just like a… It’s like an atom bomb. It’s like… It’s all the energy of who you are and who you want to be and what you love and what you hope to be explodes, and it is impossible for a single human being to offer that back to you in a mutual way. It would be like matter meeting antimatter.” Stephen Fry
apr 13 2009 ∞
oct 4 2011 +