• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July ✓
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde ✓
• White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ✓

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

• "It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world." (pg. 1)
• "evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream" (pg. 1)
• "Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself." (pg. 2)
• "I guess I should have been excited the way most other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. (I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)" (pg. 3)
• "It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers so much like water." (pg. 4)
• "a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I don't mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to." (pg. 4)
• "I always had a terribly hard time trying to imagine people in bed together." (pg. 6)
• "Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones." (pg. 7)
• "I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I've never seen before in my life." (pg. 10)
• "I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it." (pg. 13)
• "I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time." (pg. 13)
• "I felt like a hole in the ground." (pg. 16)
• "There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour." (pg. 16)
• "The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence." (pg. 18)
• "Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say, 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" (pg. 19)
• "they are all dissolving and none of them matter anymore" (pg. 20)
• "Don't let the wicked city get you down." (pg. 39)
• "At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains." (pg. 42)
• "There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends." (pg. 44)
• "The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would face away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture-chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and on all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces." (pg. 44)
• "It didn't seem to be summer any more. I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together" (pg. 45)
• "The room hovered around me with great gentleness, as if the chairs and the tables and the walls were withholding their weight out of sympathy for my sudden frailty." (pg. 47)
• "I felt purged and holy and ready for a new life." (pg. 48)
• "now he wanted me to marry him and I hated his guts." (pg. 52)
• "I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous." (pg. 54)
• "I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree." (pg. 55)
• "People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep." (pg. 56-57)
• "If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed." (pg. 59)
• "I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions." (pg. 60)

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

• "You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die." (pg. 12)
• "That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways." (pg. 13)
• "With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels." (pg. 13)
• "I know all of this: the gun, the anarchy, the explosion is really about Marla Singer." (pg. 14)
• "This isn't about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership. Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing." (pg. 14)
• "the way we think of God as big" (pg. 16)
• "and I am lost inside." (pg. 17)
• "Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. Anything you're ever proud of will be thrown away. And I'm lost inside." (pg. 17)
• "because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion." (pg. 17)
• "Too much estrogen, and you get bitch tits." (pg. 17)
• "It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero." (pg. 17)
• "'All my life,' Bob cries, 'Why I do anything, I don't know.'" (pg. 18)
• "This is my vacation." (pg. 18)
• "I just wanted to sleep. I wanted little blue Amytal Sodium capsules, 200-milligram-sized. I wanted red-and-blue Tuinal bullet capsules, lipstick-red Seconals." (pg. 19)
• "Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head." (pg. 19)
• "Chloe talked us into caves where we met our power animal. Mine was a penguin." (pg. 20)
• "and the penguin said, slide." (pg. 20)
  • "This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you." (pg. 21)
• "his eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears." (pg. 21)
• "Strangers with this kind of honesty make me go a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean." (pg. 21)
• "the front of Bob's shirt was a wet mask of how I looked like crying." (pg. 22)
• "This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom." (pg. 22)
• "Look up into the stars and you're gone." (pg. 22)
• "I was the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around." (pg. 22)
• "Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born. Resurrected." (pg. 22)
• "Because I can't hit bottom, I can't be saved." (pg. 22)
• "In this one moment, Marla's lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies." (pg. 23)

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

• "I'm so tired. Sleep's been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose. Sadly, though, I'm not looking forward to the prospect." (pg. xi)
• "Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces I'd come across later--on old napkins, the tattered edges of an envelope, once even on the back of a postage stamp; everything and anything but empty; each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, lucid; torn, strained, scotch taped; some bits crisp and clean, others faded, burnt or folded and refolded so many times the creases have obliterated whole passages of god knows what--sense? truth? deceit? a legacy of prophecy or lunacy or nothing of the kind? and in the end achieving, designating, describing, recreating--find your own words; I have no more; or plenty more but why? and all to tell--what?" (pg. xvii)

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• "Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again." (pg. 2)
• "The little prince, who asked me so many questions, never seemed to hear the ones I asked him." (pg. 7)
• "And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which annoyed me a good deal. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously." (pg. 7)
• "If you tell grown-ups, 'I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof...,' they won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, 'I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs.' Then they exclaim, 'What a pretty house!'" (pg. 10)
• "'The proof of the little prince's existence is that he was delightful, that he laughed, and that he wanted a sheep. When someone wants a sheep, that proves he exists'" (pg. 12)
• "It's sad to forget a friend. Not everyone has a friend." (pg. 12)
• "So I grope in one direction and another, as best I can. In the end, I'm sure to get certain more important details all wrong. But here you'll have to forgive me. My friend never explained anything. Perhaps he thought I was like himself. But I, unfortunately, cannot see a sheep through the sides of a crate. I may be a little like the grown-ups. I must have grown old." (pg. 13)
• "They sleep in the secrecy of the ground until one of them decides to wake up. Then it stretches and begins to sprout, quite timidly at first, a charming, harmless little twig reaching toward the sun." (pg. 14)

No one belongs here more than you. by Miranda July

• The Shared Patio
  • "the conscious mind often makes mistakes, falls for the wrong person" (pg. 1)
  • "People tend to stick to their own size group because it's easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically involved, in which case the size difference is sexy. It means: I am willing to go the distance for you." (pg. 2)
  • "If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him or her. Most people don't know that the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first." (pg. 2-3)
  • "Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone." (pg. 4)
  • "Finally he paused and squinted up at the sky, and I guessed he was constructing the perfect question for me, a fantastic question that I would have to rise up to, drawing from everything I knew about myself and mythology and this black earth." (pg. 5)
  • "I pretended I was pausing before telling him about the secret feeling of joy I hide in my chest, waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to notice that I rise each morning, seemingly with nothing to live for, but I do rise" (pg. 6)
  • "Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other." (pg. 6)
  • "I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, It's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told." (pg. 7)
  • "Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise." (pg. 11)
• The Swim Team
  • "You seem incredibly far away to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn't male or female or young or old; it is just smiling." (pg. 18)
• Majesty
  • "We come from long lines of people destined to never meet." (pg. 20)
  • "That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it." (pg. 21)
  • "Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else." (pg. 31)
• The Man on the Stairs
  • "I was trying to invent a language that could enter his sleep. But after a while I realized I wasn't even squeezing his wrist, I was just pulsing the air. That's how scared I was; I was squeezing air." (pg. 33)
  • "And in my eyes, he would see the words: _I never really knew true love._" (pg. 35)
  • "You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it's not true. Generally, people don't like each other very much." (pg. 35)
  • "Maybe they are my hands; I am the beast." (pg. 36)
  • "he is so far away and he always will be." (pg. 37)
  • "I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs." (pg. 37)
  • "I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn't laugh,I did not laugh. But I died, I did die." (pg. 38)
• The Sister
  • "I have never been in love with anyone, dead or alive." (pg. 39)
  • "There were many times a day when I needed her. When I walked or took the bus to Deagan, when I was in motion, and when I was still." (pg. 43)
  • "There's a lot of sadness in me"
    • "I can hear it." (pg. 47)
• This Person
  • "that math was just a funny way of saying 'I love you.'" (pg. 54)
  • "it is as if they have had plastic surgery, their faces are disfigured with love." (pg. 54)
• It Was Romance
  • "It was a place of overflowing collaborative misery, and we cried together." (pg. 61)
  • "pushed our crying ahead of us like a lantern, searching out new and forgotten sadnesses, ones that had died politely years ago but in fact had not died, and came to life with a little water." (pg. 61)
• Something That Needs Nothing
  • "We were kites flying in opposite directions attached to strings held by one hand." (pg. 67)
  • "In dreams I knew I was tunneling towards her--if only I could dig deep enough, I would find her. The tunnels narrowed as I crawled through them, until they became impossibly knotted stands of hair that I could only tear at." (pg. 78)
  • "I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying." (pg. 78-79)
  • "Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost." (pg. 79)
  • "The world wasn't safer than I thought; on the contrary, it was so dangerous that my practically naked self fit right in, like a car crash, it happened every day." (pg. 80)
  • "I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic." (pg. 87)
• The Boy from Lam Kien
  • "I whispered, Shut your eyes, and I shut my eyes and pretended it was night and that the world was all around me, sleeping." (pg. 105)
• Making Love in 2003
  • "I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself." (pg. 110)
  • "You are the sweetest thing in the universe." (pg. 113)
  • "Our conversations happened in my blood." (pg. 113)
  • "But I had a tingling in my arms. I was an angel looking down into the world, into one car one the world, into two members of mankind, into their souls, and into the place behind their souls: the void." (pg. 116-117)
  • "I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street." (pg. 117)
  • "I could only wonder why. Why do people live at all." (pg. 118)
  • "his darkness swelled around me for an instant and whispered, Hello, sweetness into my blood." (pg. 121)
  • "his eyes held my eyes like hands." (pg. 121)
  • "we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little. Suddenly, it seemed that language was nothing at all. Saying You were my phantom lover would clarify nothing." (pg. 121)
  • "I prayed while I looked into this eyes, and my prayer was Hello, hello, hello." (pg. 123)
  • "Our old affair was so easy, it was the dream that lovers have of consuming each other entirely." (pg. 123)
  • "Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy. I supposed I would go on being happy forever. I knew I would not mess things up by growing bored. I had done that once before." (pg. 125)
  • "Loving is all in the blood" (pg. 125)
  • "I kissed the backs of his legs and they sang." (pg. 125)
  • "my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe." (pg. 126)
  • "My thighs disintegrated into waves of contractions, and suddenly I understood why people liked guns." (pg. 127)
  • "I wept and curled and uncurled myself in a way I couldn't control. I was actually writhing in heartache, as if I were a single muscle whose purpose was to mourn." (pg. 128)
• Ten True Things
  • "This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling. Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees." (pg. 135)
  • "People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving." (pg. 138)
  • "She marveled at this, and I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I mean was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again." (pg. 138)
  • "The day felt like a birthday, our first, and we ourselves were the gifts, to be opened again and again." (pg. 138)
  • "our curiosity was blossoming like a rose, we wanted to know, we really wanted to know, all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is." (pg. 139)
  • "We grew still and stared at each other. It seemed incredibly dangerous to look into each other's eyes, but we were doing it. For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself again, like dipping the brush back in for more ink." (pg. 139)
  • "I cried in English, I cried in French, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world." (pg. 141)
  • "There was no apology in her eyes, no love or caring. But she saw me, I existed, and this lifted the beams off my shoulders." (pg. 142)
• Mon Plaisir
  • "I sang the song that goes, 'Why must I be a teenager in love?' But without the teenager in love, just 'Why must I be?' With the same yearning, though, the same heartache." (pg. 156)
  • "We could not look away from each other, every inhalation was a question: Yes? Followed by: Yes." (pg. 185)

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

• "The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim." (pg. 1)
• "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault." (pg. 1)
• "Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope." (pg. 1)
• "to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty." (pg. 1)
• "Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." (pg. 1)
• "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely." (pg. 2)
• "All art is quite useless." (pg. 2)
• "But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his finger upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake." (pg. 4)
• "there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." (pg. 4)
• "But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face" (pg. 5)
• "When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one things that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it." (pg. 6)
• "Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know" (pg. 7)
• "I can believe anything, provided that it is incredible." (pg. 8)
• "When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself." (pg. 8)
• "I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows." (pg. 8)
• "You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one." (pg. 10)
• "the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it." (pg. 11)
• "I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colors." (pg. 13)
• "I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day." (pg. 14)
• "In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place." (pg. 14)
• "how delightful other people's emotions were!--much more delightful that their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends--those were the fascinating things in life." (pg. 15)
• Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for." (pg. 20)
• "I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal" (pg. 20)
• "The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for actions is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of pleasure, or the luxury of regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." (pg. 21)
• “Don’t speak. Let me think, or, rather, let me try not to think.” (pg. 21)
• “Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” (pg. 21)
• “that is one of the great secrets of life--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.” (pg. 23)
• “you have the most marvelous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.” (pg. 24)
• “To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” (pg. 24)
• “Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.” (pg. 24)
• “Don’t squander the fold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing... A new Hedonism--that is what our century wants.” (pg. 25)
• “There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt that I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.” (pg. 25)
• “Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” (pg 25)
• “The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before.” (pg. 27)
• “Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colorless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold steal from his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.” (pg. 27)
• “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that--for that--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” (pg. 28)
• “Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old I shall kill myself.” (pg. 29)
• “I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex.” (pg. 30)
• “Sin is the only real color-element left in modern life.” (pg. 31)
• “He had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.” (pg. 34)
• “She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.” (pg. 38)
• “I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.” (pg. 38)
• “Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow... There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let is tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another, as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...” (pg. 39)
• “because in his soul who sought for her there had been awakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was!” (pg. 40)
• “I can sympathize with everything, except suffering. I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.” (pg. 43)
• “Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” (pg. 44)
• “Ah! I have talked quite enough for to-day. All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.” (pg. 47)
• "I adore it, but I am afraid of it. It makes me too romantic." (pg. 49)
• "Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing." (pg. 50)
• "You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life. For days after I met you, something seemed to throb in my veins." (pg. 52)
• "You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love." (pg. 53)
• "When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls romance." (pg. 56)
• "I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I am filled with awe." (pg. 58)
• "I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain." (pg. 59)
• "She will make the world as mad as she has made me." (pg. 59)
• "Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes." (pg. 62)
• "The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. Her eyes caught the melody, and echoed it in radiance: then closed for a moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened, the mist of a dream had passed across them." (pg. 65)
• "'I know what pleasure is!' cried Dorian Gray. 'It is to adore some one.'" (pg. 83)
• "'I have known everything,' said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his eyes, 'but I am always ready for a new emotion.'" (pg. 84)
• "I love acting. It is so much more real than life." (pg. 84)
• "Life had come between them." (pg. 84)
• "To spiritualize one's age--that is something worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world." (pg. 86)
• " The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you would have been incomplete." (pg. 86)
• "Sibyl Vane moved like a creature from a finer world. Her body swayed, while she danced, as a plant swayed in the water. The curves of her throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory." (pg. 87)
• "It was wrong in color. It took away all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal." (pg. 87)
• "'Love is a more wonderful thing than Art.'
  • 'They are both simply forms of imitation.'" (pg. 88)
• "There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing." (pg. 89)
• "Ah! can't you see my heart is breaking?" (pg. 89)
• "There is always something ridiculous about the emotion of people whom one has ceased to love." (pg. 92)
• "A faint echo of his love came back to him. He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the drew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her." (pg. 96)
• "He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow, and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution." (pg. 100)
• "I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous." (pg. 101)
• "You cut life to pieces with your epigrams." (pg. 101)
• "Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl." (pg. 103)
• "why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?" (pg. 104)
• "Some one has killed herself for of love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. The people who have adored me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me." (pg. 105)
• "nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all." (pg. 106)
• "The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died." (pg. 107)
• "If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence on dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought of conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom, in secret love or strange affinity?" (pg. 110)
• "If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things." (pg. 111)
• "I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." (pg. 112)
• "To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life." (pg. 114)
• "I should like to have something more of her than the memory of a few kisses and some broken, pathetic words." (pg. 115)
• "from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshiped you. I grew jealous of every one of whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were far away from me you were still present in my art." (pg. 117)
• "I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--too wonderful, perhaps; for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them... Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you." (pg. 117)
• "It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals them." (pg. 118)
• "It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in a dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed of were gradually revealed." (pg. 128)
• "He grew more and more enamored of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul." (pg. 131)
• "The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them." (pg. 131-2)
• "Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be." (pg. 134)
• "There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamored with death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie." (pg. 134)
• "he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having as it were, caught their color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament, and that, indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it." (pg. 135)
• "he felt a curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters--things of bestial shape and with hideous voices." (pg. 138)
• "seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul." (pg. 138)
• "Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful." (pg. 140)
• "he was almost saddened by the the reflection of the ruin that Time brought on beautiful and wonderful things." (pg. 141)
• "For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne." (pg. 143)
• "Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities." (pg. 146)
• "Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine" (pg. 149)
• "There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful." (pg. 150)
• "I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else." (pg. 153)
• "If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the molding of his hands even." (pg. 154)
• "There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated." (pg. 154)
• "But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest claims." (pg. 166)
• "'I know, my dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you'" (pg. 179)
• "'I wish it were fin du globe,' said Dorian, with a sigh. 'Life is a great disappointment.'" (pg. 183)
• "He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself." (pg. 193)
• "There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fiber of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses." (pg. 194)
• "Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it." (pg. 201)
• "Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude." (pg. 206)
• "I have no terror of Death. It is the coming of Death that terrifies me." (pg. 209)
• "She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit." (pg. 212)
• "Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it." (pg. 217)
• "To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable." (pg. 221)
• "Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets." (pg. 223)
• "Look at that great honey-colored moon that hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth." (pg. 223)
• "Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame." (pg. 224)
• "Not 'Forgive us our sins' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of man to a most just God." (pg. 226)
• "The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history." (pg. 226)

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• "Could he be born from the start / If only for a fleeting moment, / To be so dear to your heart?" - Ivan Turgenev (pg. 7)
• "The sky was so bright, and there were so many stars that, gazing upward, one couldn't help wondering how so many whimsical, wicked people could live under such a sky." (pg. 7)
• "There's something inexpressibly moving in our Petersburg countryside when, with the arrival of spring, it suddenly reveals itself in all its might and with all its God-given gifts; when it dresses up, adorns itself with bright, multicolored flowers. . . . It makes me think of a weak, frail, sickly young girl, usually regarded with pity, sometimes with compassionate love, and sometimes not even noticed, who for one moment, as if by accident, suddenly becomes immensely beautiful; and, struck and charmed, you can't help wondering what force could have lighted the flame in those sad, dreamy eyes." (pg. 11)
• "if you feel my arm tremble, it's because it has never yet been held by a pretty hand like yours." (pg. 14)
• "Besides, isn't it better for you when everything is out in the open? For I don't know how to be silent when my heart is talking." (pg. 14)
• "I've only gone around dreaming that one day I might meet someone. If you only knew how many times I've fallen in love that way. . . ." (pg. 14)
  • "But how's that, who did you fall in love with?"
    • "Why, no one in particular, just with the ideal woman, the one I'd dreamed of. I can dream up whole novels, you know." (pg. 15)
• "Talk to her shyly, respectfully passionately; tell her that I was perishing in my loneliness; beseech her not to send me away" (pg. 15)
• "I'm simply a dreamer who has little real life, and moments like this are so rare in my existence that I must repeat them again and again in my thoughts. You'll stay in my thoughts throughout the night--throughout the whole year." (pg. 16)
• "I've been completely alone. Alone, all alone--do you understand what that means?" (pg. 19)
• "dreamers live in those corners. A dreamer, if you want me to define him, is not a real human being but a sort of intermediary creature. He usually installs himself in some remote corner, shrinking even in the daylight. And once he's installed in that corner of his, he grows into it like a snail" (pg. 21)
• "you speak beautifully, but couldn't you speak less beautifully? You sound as though you were reading aloud from a book." (pg. 23)
  • "I know I say things too beautifully; I'm terribly sorry, but I don't know how to say them otherwise." (pg. 23)
• "I've been looking for someone, and that's a sure sign that it must have been you I was looking for and that we were destined to meet." (pg. 23)
• "His heart felt empty and sad. His world of fancy silently and without a crackle collapses around him and evaporates without his being able to remember what he was dreaming about. But some dark feeling presses on his breast, making it heave faster; a new desire tickles and excites his fancy; and, almost without noticing it, he summons an array of new ghosts." (pg. 25)
• "Loneliness and idleness excite the imagination." (pg. 25)
• "he would exchange his dreams neither for happiness, nor joy; at that grim hour of regret and unrelieved gloom he won't even care to choose. But until that perilous time comes, the dreamer can have no desires, for he has everything; he is above desire, he is surfeited, he is himself the artist creating his life at every hour, guided only by his own inspiration." (pg. 26-7)
• "he deceives himself and winds up by believing that he is moved by a true, live passion, that there is substance--flesh and blood--to his fancies!" (pg. 27)
• "Can you believe, looking at him, Nastenka, that he doesn't even know the woman he loved so passionately in his sultry flights of fancy? Can you believe that he has only seen her in irresistibly voluptuous mirages and that he simply dreamed that passion? Is it really possible that they have never walked hand in hand during so many years, spurning the rest of the universe, merging their own two worlds and lives? Is it possible that at the late hour when they had to part, she didn't really lay her head, sobbing and miserable, on his chest, not hearing the wind that snatched tears from her black eyelashes? Would you believe it was all nothing but a dream--the wild, neglected garden with its path overgrown with moss, so lonely and desolate, along which they used to walk together so often, hoping, suffering, loving so tenderly and for so long?" (pg. 27-8)
• "how pure and innocent was their love, how wicked... were the people around them!" (pg. 28)
• "They hold each other tight, and in a moment they've forgotten their unhappiness, their separation, all their sufferings, the forbidding house, the old man, the bleak garden in their homeland, the bench where he kissed her for the last time, holding her in his desperate embrace from which she had to tear herself, leaving him with his suffering...." (pg. 28)
• "I was already regretting having gone too far and told her things which had been weighing on my heart for a long time, things about which I could talk smoothly as a book because I had long ago pronounced judgment on myself and couldn't help reading it out now and confessing without expecting to be misunderstood." (pg. 29)
• "As I sit here next to you, it is already painful to think of the future, because there's nothing in it but a lonely, stale, useless existence. What could I dream of, now that I've been so happy with you in real life?" (pg. 29)
• "there are moments when I'm overcome by such anguish and despair that... In those moments, I feel that I'll never have a true life because I feel sure I've entirely lost touch with reality; because I feel damned; because, in the middle of my fancy-filled nights, I have moments of lucidity that are unbearable! In the meantime, I hear the din of the human crowd around me and see how people who are awake live, and I realize that their lives are not made to measure, that they don't shatter like dreams, like visions, that their lives are perpetually renewed, every hour in them different from the one before, whereas the timid daydream is horribly monotonous, a slave to the shadows, to ideas, to the first cloud that suddenly hides the sun and squeeze in anguish the heart of a true inhabitant of Petersburg who must have his sunshine--for what fancy is there that can do without sunshine? In the end, you feel that your much-vaunted, inexhaustible fantasy is growing tired, debilitated, exhausted, because you're bound to grow out of your old ideals; they've smashed to splinters and turn to dust, and if you have no other life, you have no choice but to keep rebuilding your dreams from the splinters and dust. But the heart longs for something different! And it is in vain to dig in the ashes of your old fancies, trying to find even a tiny spark to fan into a new flame that will warm the chilled heart and bring back to life everything that can send the blood rushing wildly through the body, fill the eyes with tears--everything that can delude you so well!" (pg. 30)
• "Would you believe that I have taken to celebrating the anniversaries of my sensations, the anniversary of something that was delightful at one time, of something that actually never occurred. I am reduced to celebrating anniversaries because I no longer have anything with which to replace even those silly, flimsy dreams." (pg. 30)
• "I like revisiting, at certain times, spots where I was once happy; I like to shape the present in the image of the irretrievable past. So I often roam like a sad, gloomy, shadow, without need or aim" (pg. 30-31)
• "I may remember that although my dreams were sad and life was painful, somehow it was not as agonizing as it has become now; the black forebodings that have since taken hold of me weren't there yet; nor was there the gnawing, dreary feeling of guilt that now torments me day and night, never leaving me a moment's peace. And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!'" (pg. 31)
• "The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees... Ah Nastenka, won't it be sad to be left alone, all, all alone, without even having anything to regret--nothing, but nothing; for everything I've lost is nothing but a stupid round zero, nothing but a flimsy fancy?" (pg. 31)
• "As to loving, had I loved you for twenty years, I'm sure I couldn't possibly love you more than I do now." (pg. 32)
• "I was so moved and delighted that I felt terribly like putting my arms around her. She was blushing deeply and laughing, and tiny glistening tears hung on her black eyelashes." (pg. 42)
• "I am oppressed by strange thoughts and dark sensations; throngs of vague questions obsess me, but I have neither the strength not the desire to cope with them." (pg. 43)
• "Yes, joy and happiness do make a person beautiful. His heart overflows with love, and he seems to try to pour that love into the heart of a fellow creature. He wants everything to laugh and to sparkle. And his joy is so contagious!" (pg. 43)
• "our own unhappiness makes us more sensitive to the unhappiness of others. When someone is unhappy, his sensitivity is not scattered; it becomes tense and concentrated." (pg. 44)
• "I like you so much because you haven't fallen in love with me." (pg. 44)
• "Yes, I'm not myself now, I'm all expectation, I feel a little too light..." (pg. 45)
• "It was as if time had stopped and one sensation, one feeling would remain in me from then on; as if one minute was going to stretch out into eternity; as if life would stop and stand still for me. I was going to tell you as soon as we met. When I woke up, I was under the impression that some sweet melody, heard somewhere long ago and since forgotten, had come back to me now, that for all these years, I'd been searching for it, longing for it, but only now--" (pg. 45-46)
• "My heart was overflowing. I tried to speak but words wouldn't come." (pg. 51)
• "come to think of it, my dear, maybe all my love for him was nothing but a delusion, maybe it began as a childish adventure" (pg. 51)
• "We didn't know what to say. We laughed. We cried. We exchanged thousands of disconnected, meaningless words." (pg. 56)
• "I told you I loved you--well, I do love you, and it's even more than love." (pg. 59)
• "Yes, thank you for that love! It lingers in my memory like a sweet dream that remains long after awakening." (pg. 59)
• "My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?" (pg. 61)