• "Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors." - Louisa May Alcott
• “There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.” — Tennessee Williams
• "To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of

strangers is to me the worst sort of torment." -Susanna Clarke

• "Label me, define me, nail me down with cold words and that box will be your coffin, for I do not know who I am." — Rumi
• "I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one." - Robert Byrne
• "Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start

and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it."- Ernest Hemingway

• "I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced." — Lawrence Durrel
• "I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show." — Andrew Wyeth