"It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books." Jo Walton

"There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

"Being a good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times." J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

"But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat." J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

"When all else fails, philosophize." J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

"It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet." J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

"Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose. Perhaps he is wrong to think of Lucy as homosexual. Perhaps she simply prefers female company. Or perhaps that is all that lesbians are: women who have no need of men." J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens." Carlos Ruiz Zafón

"That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment." Mary Ann Shaffer

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours." Alan Bennett

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose." Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

"The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you."

"Every hour wounds. The last one kills."

"Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all', but 'So this is what God is really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'" C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy - our favorite pub, our favorite wood. But I decided to do it at once - like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he's had a crash. Unexpectely, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything." C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"It is not true that I'm always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the tmes when I'm not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs - nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time - but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this I see the rowan berries reddening and don't know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What's wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember. This is one of the things I'm afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?" C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How long - will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say 'I never realized my loss till this moment'?" C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue. Yet H. herself, dying of it, and well knowing the fact, said that she had lost a great deal of her old horror at it. When the reality came, the name ena dht e idea were in some degree disarmed. [...] One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call 'the thing itself.' But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea." C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"You never really know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?" C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand." C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"There is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it." C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on." C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness." C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"He said, '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.'"

"A good book is never finished - it goes on whispering to you from the wall." Virginia Woolf

"Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories." Hilary Mantel

"Eu conheço muitas espécies de silêncio, sou de natureza calada, e para mim não há nada mais gratificante do que o silêncio a dois, quando os dois estão bem juntinhos e nem sentem necessidade de botar no toda-discos um solo de flauta, daqueles suavíssimos. Então os sentimentos mais requintados se exprimem independente de palavras e circulam entre os amantes numa telegrafia maravilhosa. Você sabe disso, você que me ensinou a curtir o calado, as finíssimas emoções do calado, que eu queria traduzir em gestos de carinho, passando a mão de leve nos seus cabelos, no seu rosto, na sua perna esquerda estendida sobre a areia." Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Os Dias Lindos

"Presta bem atenção no que te digo: se não me devoras, que será de nós dois?" Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Os Dias Lindos

"To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

"Quem não vê bem uma palavra não pode ver bem uma alma." Fernando Pessoa

"He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how." Nietzsche

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life." W. Somerset Maugham

"The author and the reader 'know' each other; they meet on a bridge of words." Madeleine L'Engle

"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." W.B. Yeats

"Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw." David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

"He was wondering if love came in other colors other than the basic black of none and the red heat of obsession."

"Amor, então, aquilo? Aquele sobe e desce de nádegas? Aquele entra e sai do pobre pênis pequenino, insignificante, úmido? Amor, o divino amor! Afinal de contas, os modernos tinham razão em seu desprezo por essa comédia, porque era uma comédia. Bem verdade o dito de um poeta: 'O Deus que criou o homem devia ter um sinistro senso de humor, para fazer dele uma criatura de razão e ao mesmo tempo obrigá-lo a essa postura grotesca - e também impeli-lo a, cegamente, desejar tão ridícula comédia.'" D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"O senso físico da injustiça torna-se algo perigoso quando se revela. Se não encontrar um derivativo devora aquele que o nutre." D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"Quando um der recebe golpe por demais violento, mas que não dá para matar o corpo, a alma parece estabelecer-se à proporção que o corpo se recompõe. Mas só na aparência. A ferida da alma não fecha; começa de repente a manifestar-se de novo, lentamente a princípio, depois invasoramente até empolgar a ama inteira - quando supomos que tudo já está cicatrizado e esquecido, lá vem o contragolpe fatal." D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"Dai-me o filho dum homem são, normalmente inteligente e dele farei um Chatterley apto a continuar a linha. O que conta não é o homem que nos engendrou, mas o lugar que o destino nos deu. Ponha uma criança qualquer na classe dirigente, e se tiver valor tornar-se-à chefe. Ponha um filho de rei ou duque entre as massas, ele se tornará um pequeno plebeu, lídimo produto das massas. Há influência irresistível do meio." D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"Se você tem simpatia por uma mulher, deve deitar-se com ela. A única coisa decente a fazer é deitar-se com ela. Do mesmo modo quando temos interesse em conversar com alguem; o que há a fazer é abordar esse alguém, em vez de ficar a morder pudicamente a língua. Digamos-lhe logo o que temos a dizer. No amor, a mesma coisa." D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"Gosto dessa idéia de que o amor não passa duma forma de diálogo em que as palavras se substituem pela ação. Parece-me justo isso. Penso que poderíamos trocar com as mulheres muitas sensações e emoções, como trocamos idéias sobre o bom ou o mau tempo. O amor poderia ser uma espécie de conversação normal e física entre os dois sexos. Nunca conversamos com uma mulher se ambos não temos ideias comuns - pelo menos não conversamos com interesse. Também não nos podemos deitar com elas, se não experimentarmos emoção e simpatia em comum." D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"São assim os homens, ingratos e nunca satisfeitos. Quando desprezados, enfurecem-se de serem desprezados; e quando aceitos, queixam-se disso. Puras crianças, descontentes, jamais satisfeitos por mais que uma mulher faça." D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"Por mais que filosofassem sobre o assunto, aquelas relações sexuais constituiam uma das mais antigas sujeições. Os poetas que as glorificavam eram homens - a mulher sempre percebeu que há coisa mais alta que o amor físico. E, por experiência própria, estavam agora as duas convencidas disso. A bela e a pura liberdade duma mulher valia muito mais que o amor sexual. O triste é o atraso do homem nesse ponto. Eles insistem pela cópula, como cães. E a mulher tem de ceder, tão infantilmente teimosos os homens se mostram. Ou a mulher cede ou temo-los a se comportarem como crianças malcriadas, que estragam tudo com seus amuos. Mas a mulher pode ceder só na aparência, conservando-se livre e dona de si lá no infinito." D.H. Lawrence, O Amante de Lady Chatterley

"Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"She had done the wrong thing. And at best, even doing the right thing, she could not make Carol happy as Carol made her happy, she thought as she had thought a hundred times before." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"He stared at her and for a moment beneath the anger she saw the fixed curiosity she had seen before, as if he were watching a spectacle through a keyhole. But she knew he was not so detached as that. On the contrary, she sensed that he was never so bound to her as now, never so determined not to give her up. It frightened her. She could imagine the determination transformed to hatred and to violence." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"She envied him. She envied his faith there would always be a place, a home, a job, someone else for him. She envied him that attitude. She almost resented his having it." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"Therese saw Carol look up at them from a table near the counter of the room, and almost like the first time, like the echo of an impact that had been tremendous, Therese was jolted by the sight of her." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"She remembered a picnic they had had last summer, off the road near Tarrytown (...) She remembered that moment of contentment, that conviction that they shared something wonderfully real and rare together that day, and she wondered now where it had gone to, on what it had been based. For now even his long, flat figure standing beside her seemed to opress her with its weight. She forced down her resentment, but it only grew heavy inside her, like a thing of substance." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"He resented the fact that she wasn't and never could be what he wished her to be, a girl who loved him passionately and would love to go to Europe with him. A girl like herself, with her face, with her ambitions, but a girl who adored him." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"Do people always fall in love with things they can't have?" Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything, for certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe. Do you think, do you think, it began. Do you think both of us will die violently someday, be suddenly shut off? But even that question wasn't definite enough. Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don't want to die yet without knowing you. Do you feel the same way?" Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"They saw more and more of each other, without actually growing closer. She still wasn't in love with him, not after ten months, and maybe she never could be, though the fact remained that she liked him better than any person she had ever known, certainly any man. Sometimes she thought she was in love with him, waking up in the morning and looking blankly at the ceiling, remembering suddenly that she knew him, remembering suddenly his face shining with affection for her because fo some gesture of affection on her part, before of her sleepy emptiness had time to fill up with the realization of what time it was, what day, what she had to do, the soldier substance that made up one's life. But the feeling bore no resemblance to what she had read about love. Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"Therese's lips opened to speak, but her mind was too far away. Her mind was at a distant point, at a distant vortex that opened on the scene in the dimly lighted, terrifying room where the two of them seemed to stand in desperate combat. And at the point of the vortex where her mind was, she knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her and nothing else. It was the hopelessness of Mrs. Robichek's ailing body and her job at the store, of her stack of dresses in the trunk, of her ugliness, the hopelessness of which the end of her life was entirely composed. And the hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing but a dream, and was this real? It was the terror of this hopelessness that made her want to shed the dress and flee before it was too late, before the chains fell around her and locked." Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

"Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." Gabriel García Márquez

"Is there no way out of the mind?" Sylvia Plath

"I'm afraid to live and I'm afraid to die. What a way to exist." Katie Joy Crawford

"You'll ache. And you're going to love it. It will crush you. And you're still going to love all of it. Doesn't it sound lovely beyond belief?" Ernest Hemingway

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." Ernest Hemingway

"She's mad but she's magic. There is no lie in her fire." Bukowski

"Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul." Joanne Harris

"Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder." E. B. White

"We meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it." Jung

"If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man - then you are ready for a walk." Henry David Thoreau

"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone." Carson McCullers

"One can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes." Virginia Woolf

"The only thing we can depend on in life is that everything changes. The seasons, our partners, what we want and need. We hold hands with our high school friends and swear to never lose touch, and then we do. We scrape ice off our cars and feel like winter will never end, and it does. We stand in the bathroom and look at our face and say, "Stop getting old, face. I command you!" and it doesn't listen. Change is the only constant. Your ability to navigate and tolerate change and its painful uncomfortableness directly correlates to your happiness and general well-being."

"'São perfeitas', ouvia-a dizer com frequência. 'Qualquer homem será feliz com elas, porque foram criadas para sofrer.'"

"Scribitur and narrandum, non ad probandum." (Escreve-se para contar, não para provar). Tito Lívio

"I suddenly felt how lonely it is, constantly finding yourself the only person who can see the truth in this gullible world." Jonas Karlsson, The Room

"Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?" Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you." Jung

"Desespero eu aguento. O que me apavora é essa esperança." Millôr Fernandes

"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain." Helen Keller

"If love didn't exist I'd be in the record books, trust me. I'd have solved the problems of the world twice over. And if not that, at least I'd have slept tonight. If love did not exist I would be so goddamn sane." Andrea Gibson

"I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have and adventure, be careful. Come back and you're going to see your country differently, you're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It's not what Tom Friedman writes about, I'm sorry. You're going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists on walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can't get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people come back and go "Oh!". And the lightbulb goes on." Henry Rollins

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Robert Frost

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." Sylvia Plath

"I'm not saying that everyone needs to be celibate, but you don't need a romance to complete a story about a woman." Greta Gerwig

"She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"I tried to cry silently [...] Mouth contorted and hanging open, tears streaming into it. It was the thought of being one again, after having being three - of silence and perfect order after all the noise." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"Another month went by and I realized she might not know. I might be waiting for years. She might grow old in this house, with her son and the employee of her parents, never knowing she was supposed to abandon me." Miranda July, The Fist Bad Man

"We had fallen in love; that was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk - always on all fours, always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan on these improbable loves? An hour. A week. A few months at best. The end was a natural thing, like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part - there was no one to blame and no way to reverse it." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"Was this all real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"You are already a part of this. You will eat, you will laught at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. This is when you get to die. Not now." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"Of course, there is no 'right' choice. If you choose death I won't be mad. I've wanted to choose it myself a few times." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"'What keeps us coming back?' he asked quietly. I smiled into the phone. What an amazing thing to be asked. Right now, tucked into the warmth of my car with this unanswearable question before me - this might have been my favorite moment of all the lifetimes." Miranda July

"I realize that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"That's the problem with men my age, I'm somehow older than them." Miranda July, The First Bad Man

"Antes de se casar, julgava sentir amor; mas, como a ventura resultante desse amor não aparecia, com certeza se enganara, pensava ela. E procurava saber qual era, afinal, o significado certo, nesta vida, das palavras 'felicidade', 'paixão', e 'embriaguez', que nos livros pareciam tão belas." Gustave Flaubert

"Ela lhe pareceu, então, de tal forma virtuosa e inacessível, que toda esperança, mesmo a mais vaga, o abandonou. Mas, com tal renúncia, ele a colocava em condições extraordinárias. Para ele, ela se livrava das qualidades carnais, de que ele nada podia conseguir; a moça foi, em seu coração, subindo sempre e se fazendo cada vez mais nítida, à maneira portentosa duma apoteose que se eleva bem alto. Era um desses sentimentos puros que não se embaraçam a marcha da vida, que se conservam porque são raros, cuja perda ocasionaria dor maior que o regozijo da posse." Gustave Flaubert

"O amor, no seu entender, devia surgir de repente, com ruídos e fulgurações, tempestade dos céus que cai sobre a vida e a revolve, arranca as vontades como folhas e arrebata para o abismo o coração inteiro. Ela não sabia que nos terraços das casas a chuva forma poças quando as calhas estão entupidas, de maneira que se pôs de sobreaviso, até que subitamente descobriu uma fenda na parede." Gustave Flaubert

"There's no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Maya Angelou