THE ALCHEMIST - Paulo Coelho

• No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.
• The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.
• One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.
• Everyone on earth has a treasure that awaits him.
• Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we've learned as we've moved toward that dream.
• There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
• When we love, we always strive to become better than we are.

NICK & NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST - Rachel Cohn & David Levithan

• My heart literally aches, that shit is not made up; it hurts for an unexpected, brief time warp of suddenly wanting and longing and believing, but then not having.
• If I had my guitar, I might be able to make some change. But instead all I have are the songs crashing together in my head. They're all sad. They're all bitter. And they're all I have.
• Nick, Norah's not gone. She's clearly someplace. All you have to do is find out where that is.
• If I'm a horrid bitch from planet Schizophrenia, it's because boys make me one.
• Life fails. Songs don't always.
• But I guess you don't see the planets when you're staring at the sun. You just get blinded.
• The waitress probably thinks I'm the worst kind of perv, because I can't stop staring at the bathroom door.
• I shouldn't want the song to end. I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• You always have to take the side of the dead.
• The only thing I prayed to God for was to give me the courage to kill myself.
• A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.
• I couldn't bring myself to admit that life might end up resembling bad literature so much.
• The only thing that didn't occur to her was to give up.
• None of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.

SNUFF - Chuck Palahniuk

• It can only take a moment to waste the rest of your life.
• No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you'll always be known for that one poor choice.
• In my life, I've been wrong about almost everything.
• Nothing if not a numbers game, that's what today is.
• It was a one-time mistake, boy, but don't you make it last the rest of your life.
• My feet walked me down the aisle of the Greyhound bus, all the way to the back. My butt sat me in a seat. My butt's accomplished a lot since then. My butt's a movie star.
• Marie Prevost went from the biggest female movie star to dog food -- like that.
• There are always worse ways to kick the bucket...
• By smells and tastes and touch, we were finding out about each other. Saying what we couldn't with words.
• It's only hate makes you that patient. Nothing except a lifetime of festering anger and hatred would give you the determination to wait around corners for hours, rain or shine, to loiter at bus stops just in case Cassie Wright happened by. To get revenge.
• What do you do when your entire identity is destroyed in an instant? How do you cope when your whole life story turns out to be wrong?
• Don't you know? The damaged love the damaged.
• Cyanide and sugar. Poison and antidote. Like maybe we balance each other out.
• Their flesh married in hate, burned together deeper than any wedding could leave them. Conjoined. Cauterized.

BOY MEETS BOY - David Levithan

• It's hard to groove when you've got things on your mind. Sometimes you can use the dancing to fight them off. But I don't want to fight this off. I want to keep it.
• Maybe you were just waiting for the right time to notice.
• I can sum it up in one word: Joy.
• We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the Technicolor of the moment.
• Do you know wen you cross against traffic? You look down the street and see a car coming, but you know you can get across before it gets to you. So even though there's a DON'T WALK sign, you cross anyway. And there's always a split second when you turn and see that car coming, and you know that if you don't continue moving, it will all be over. That's how I feel a lot of the time. I know I'll make it across. I always make it across. But the car is always there, and I always stop to watch it coming.
• I am freaking out because I've been caught -- not by anyone else, but myself. I see what I am doing. And I can't stop myself from making things worse.
• Sometimes the space between knowing what to do and actually doing it is a very short walk. Other times it is an impossible expanse.
• I don't even have time to think about the words I'm going to say. I have to hope they'll be there when I need them.
• I got myself into this mess. I can get myself out. Or so I think.
• I figure this is my new beginning... or my last resort.
• Some things are easy. But I realize he might not be experiencing them now.
• By the time I choose to make a move, he's already gone.
• This helps pass the time, but it doesn't do my spirits much good.
• Now, "it's a free country" has to be the lamest reason ever invented.
• I want to laugh, too. It hurts me that I can't.
• My backpack is heavy, my thoughts even heavier.
• If I turn around and flee, it would be the ultimate cowardice.
• I head out without the boots -- they don't fit right. Or maybe it's my mood that doesn't fit.
• I could point out that it isn't always easy knowing who you are and what you want, because then you have no excuse for not trying to get it.
• And I know I can't prove them wrong by changing myself or by denying what I really am. The only way for me to prove them wrong is to try to be who I am and show them it's not hurting me to be that way.
• I am sitting no more than five feet away from her, but she's in a different world.
• If there's no feeling of fear, then there's no need for courage.
• If you want to be loved, be lovable.
• It is, as I said, a victory. It might not last, but right now it means everything to me.
• There are so many word in our language; we get to know so few of them.
• Just because I don't think we'd be good together doesn't mean we have to be apart.
• I always secretly believe that putting together a party is more fun than actually attending.

RANDOM

• And it presses up a cry in you: unheard fish-cry of the solitary animal, overwhelmed by its own sea.

ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY - David Sedaris

• Some motherfucker told me to get the fuck out of his motherfucking face, so I said, 'Fuck off, fuckface.'
• I'm guessing he stopped after when he was fucking finished.
• Someone had finally been naive enough to trust me, and I'd rewarded her with death.
• Here is a system designed to eliminate pleasure for everyone involved.
• BIG BOY
• It was one thing to be disliked, but I imagine it must be really smart to find yourself repeatedly taken advantage of.
• I'd begun to imagine my life in a foreign country, some faraway land where, if things went wrong, I could always blame somebody else, saying I'd never wanted to live there in the first place.
• Their personalities were entirely my own invention. On the downside, my personality was entirely their invention.
• I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly.
• A bell, though -- that's fucked up.
• "Hi, guys," I'd say, opening a new box of paper clips.
• It's not such a terrible place to start, but the joy of accomplishment wears off fairly quickly.
• On Easter, having learned that The Greatest Story Ever Told was sold out, I just crossed the street and saw Superfly, the second-greatest story ever told.
• The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free.
• People are insecure, they wear masks and play games.
• The message was that if something is free, you should take only the best. If, on the other hand, you're forced to pay, it's best to lower the bar and not be so choosy.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
• Wounds begin to bleed again as if they had been inflicted only yesterday.
• What the hell do you mean, a spy? I'm nothing but a poor lover.
• The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.
• The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
• This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppresive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.
• They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion.
• Both of them fell, in an agony of desire, into the void of a bottomless pit that smelled of a salt marsh full of prawns.
• He convinced her that one comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them for whatever reason, one's own or someone else's, willingly or unwillingly, loses them forever.
• He felt poor, ugly, inferior, and unworthy not only of her but of any other woman on the face of the earth.
• She summed up many months of bliss with four words of Carribean slang: "It's not so much."
• The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.
• It was a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.
• The world is divided into those who can shit and those who cannot.
• The world is divided into thos who screw and those who do not.
• Florentino Ariza could not endure the pangs of grief at the thought that this admirable man would have to die in order for him to be happy.
• Everybody has to die, but he more than anyone else.
• Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down.
• He knew he was incapable of saying her name without everyone's noticing the pallor of his lips.
• Life in the world, which had caused her so much uncertainty before she was familiar with it, was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder.
• Nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
• And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman.
• But she was still the same person inside her ruined body.
• When you're ugly and poor, you can only want more.
• ...solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.
• For the more days that passed without her letters being returned, the greater his hope of a reply.
• Aim, aim got my aim -- if I miss you I'm not to blame.
• It was a forbidden word: "before."
• Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?
• Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.
• Too much love is as bad for this as no love at all.

ALONG FOR THE RIDE - Sarah Dessen

• Failing sucks. But it's better than the alternative. Which is not even trying.
• No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.
• There a worse thing than an awkward tinge -- always wondering if it might have gone the other way.
• I'd learned that it's not just where you go, but how you choose to get there.

NEVERWHERE - Neil Gaiman

• "Why do people like that stay alive?" "Not enough guts to end it all."
• Croup and Vandemar -- eyes gouged, noses twisted, toungues pierced, chins clef, throats slit.
• Still plenty of sewer in his lungs
• That, is for me to know and him to wonder.
• Halfway across space and time.

STARGIRL - Jerry Spinelli

• The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long.
• And the trouble with bad times is, you can't sleep through them.
• Events become feelings, feelings become events.
• "Do you have the time?" "Nobody has the time. The time cannot be owned. The time is free to everyone!"
• A lovely treason

GIRLS ON FILM - Zoey Dean

• If she was so over him, why the hell did she need to keep thinking about how much she was over him?
• At least when she was writing, she was in charge of what all the characters said and did.
• Feeling something and acting on it are two different things.
• Do you ever feel like if you let yourself give in to everything you want, that you'd just never stop wanting?

AFTER DARK - Haruki Murakami

• Don't people usually ask questions because they want answers?
• The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts.

DIARY - Chuck Palahniuk

• Everyone's in their own personal coma.
• Does anybody really know why they like anything?
• Who knows why we like what we like?
• Why do we do what we do?
• What you do with your hands, you're always blabbing your life story.
• The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell.
• According to Thomas Mann, great artists are great invalids.
• What you don't understand, you can make mean anything.
• This girl, her latest "work" was stuffing a teddy bear with dog shit. Her title for all this was: Illusions of Childhood.
• Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.
• The trouble is, Angel says, we're running out of places to hide.
• This is why we love who we love. Whether or not you're consciously aware of them, this is the reason we do what we do. This is how we know what we don't know.
• You're doomed to being you.
• Everything is a self-portrait.
• Peter used to say that an artist's job is to make order out of chaos.
• You make sense out of senseless facts.
• The truth is, wherever you choose to be, it's the wrong place.
• The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.
• It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness.
• What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life is about discovering who you already were.
• The way Plato says we already know everything, we just need to remember it.

BACK IN BLACK - Zoey Dean

• Sometimes she felt as if everything she'd learned about love had come from reading Jane Eyre; her personal experience was woefully lacking.

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER - Stephen Chbosky

• So, what's the point of using words nobody else knows or can say comfortably?
• ..I just can't bring myself to floss.
• You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand.
• Maybe these are my glory days, and I'm not even realizing it because they don't involve a ball.
• And I thought about how many people have loved these songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of these songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs.
• They just knew. And I think that's all you can ever ask from a friend.
• I don't know why I'm telling you this.
• ..I didn't want to see my mother's face and especially my father's if they heard me say the truth. So I didn't say anything. I just kept quiet and looked around. And noticed things.
• Everything can't be low self-esteem, can it?
• Something is really wrong with me. And I don't know what it is.
• It's just hard to see a friend hurt this much. Especially when you can't do anything except "be there."
• But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things.

SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS - Chuck Klosterman

• Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.
• We don't know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist.
• Important things are inevitably cliché, but nobody wants to admit that.
• Do these people not realize that even if you wake up around seven, you're not supposed to get out of bed until nine?
• I think about dying constantly, and I think everybody else should, too.

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

• What she most wanted was to blend in with her background by changing color and shape, to remain inconspicuous and not easily remembered.
• I know you've got something inside you that you need to write about, but you can't get it to come out. It's like a frightened little animal hiding way back in a cave--you know it's in there, but there's no way to catch it until it comes out.
• I want to outwit the system and make idiots out of the whole bunch of them.
• Once you start lying to the public, you have to keep lying. It never ends.
• But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got.
• In that sense, she was not the kind of beautiful girl who becomes a model or a pop star. Rather, she had something about her that aroused people and drew them toward her.
• Her style of speaking had some distinguishing characteristics: sentences shorn of embellishment, a chronic shortage of inflection, a limited vocabulary (or at least what seemed like a limited vocabulary).

THE GODFATHER - Mario Puzo

• Among reasonable men problems of business could always be solved.
• A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.