Whether or not I even like the people or work that I am quoting is irrelevant; these are simply things that I found inspiring at the time that I came across them. Multiple quotes from one person/piece of work is simply because I could not, and don't really care to, choose my favorite. They are in no particular order.

• "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I can't get enough of the taste of gun metal."
  • Robert Downey Jr.
• "It's not, 'I could die for you,' but rather, 'I've decided I'll live for you.'"
  • From the song Itoshii Hito by Miyavi
• "Sex is more sexy than death."
• From the book Lost by Gregory Maguire.
• "Waste not, want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?"
  • From the book The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
• "We were a society dying of too much choice."
  • From the book The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
• "I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor."
  • From the book The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
• "What I want us to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction."
  • From the book Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
• "How torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer."
  • From the book Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
• "This isn't about quality. It's about volume."
  • From the book Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.
• "Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can hurt like hell."
  • From the book Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.
• "Home, home–a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells."
  • From the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
• "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."
  • From the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
• "He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper."
  • From the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
• "In the past men were handsome and great (now they are children and dwarves), but this is merely one of the facts that demonstrate the disaster of an aging world. The young no longer want to study anything, learning is in decline, the whole world walks on its head, blind men lead others equally blind and cause them to plunge into the abyss, birds leave the nest before they can fly, the jackass plays the lyre, oxen dance. Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life, Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman. Everything is on the wrong path."
  • From the book The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
• "At just past fifteen Tommy had learned one of life's hardest lessons, lying in wait for the young and guileless: that despair, like love, leaves no visible signs, even to those who are supposed to know us best; and that despair, like love, exists in its own time, outside clocks and calendars, a ceaseless rhythm of waiting, of progression, and of pain. "
  • From the book The Catch Trap by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
• "In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truthlike and filled with details so delicate, so unexpected, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or even Turgenav, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system."
  • From the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
• "One of the highest aims of art has been the creation of unrest."
  • Ivan Jirous.
• "No one's taking heads home in buckets anymore."
  • From the book Stiff by Mary Roach.
• "Of late he had often felt drawn to wander about this district, when he felt depressed, that he might feel more so."
  • From the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
• "'Where is it?' thought Raskolnikov, 'Where is it I've read that some one condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only had room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all around him, a thousand years, eternity, it would be better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"
  • From the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
• "We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that."
  • From the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
• "There can be no lonelier state of being than that of being a corpse."
  • From the book Stiff by Mary Roach.
• "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
  • Jorge Luis Borges.
• "He that loveth a book will never want a faithful friend."
  • Isaac Barrow.
• "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it'll be, and imagining that the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
  • From the book Looking for Alaska by John Green.
• "So I walked back to my room and collapsed onto the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane."
  • From the book Looking for Alaska by John Green.
• "She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense."
  • From the book Looking for Alaska by John Green.
• "A light poured out of him and became the spirit of the room, a genie released from a bottle after centuries of darkness."
  • From the book How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford.
• "I had no cause to be happy. I felt sad with good reason, and it wouldn't be right to mess with that feeling. I thought I ought to just stay sad for a while."
  • From the book How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford.
• "The sky was broad and hopeless beyond the windows."
  • From the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire.
• "The real thing about evil," said the Witch at the doorway, "isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it -- the human side, say -- and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret."
  • From the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire.
• "Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it."
  • From the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire.
• "Dan, my boy, the doc was right; you've been trying to dive down the neck of a bottle. That's okay for your pointy head, but it's too narrow for your shoulders."
  • From the book The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein.
• "The name sounded different in his mouth when spoken to her; it became not the name with which he had been so long obsessed, but a word that described only her, a word that smelled like lilacs, that captured the blue of her eyes and the length of her lashes."
  • From the book An Abundance of Katherines by John Green.
• "Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."
  • From the book An Abundance of Katherines by John Green.
• "Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "In the envelope were three photographs, more or less the same, though taken from different angles: a tall delicate Negro man wearing a calico skirt and with a shy, yet vain smile, displaying in his hands an odd wood sculpture, an elongated carving of a head, a girl's, her hair sleek and short as a young man's, her smooth wood eyes too large and tilted in the tapering face, her mouth wide, overdrawn, not unlike clown-lips. On a glance it resembled most primitive carving; and then it didn't, for here was the spitting image of Holly Golightly, at least as much of a likeness as a dark still thing could be."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "Light me a cigarette, darling," she said, snatching off a bathing cap and shaking her hair. "I don't mean you, O.J. You're such a slob. You always nigger-lip."
  • From the book Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "She scooped up the cat and swung him onto her shoulder. He perched there with the balance of a bird, his paws tangled in her hair as if it were knitting yarn; and yet, despite these amicable antics, it was a grim cat with a pirate's cutthroat face; one eye was gluey-blind, the other sparkled with dark deeds."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "But he's got a point, I should feel guilty. Not because they would have given me the part or because I would have been good: they wouldn't and I wouldn't. If I do feel guilty, I guess it's because I let him go on dreaming when I wasn't dreaming a bit. I was just vamping for time to make a few self-improvements: I knew damn well I'd never be a movie star. It's too hard; and if you're intelligent, it's too embarrassing. My complexes aren't inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually it's essential not to have any ego at all. I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "She was still hugging the cat. "Poor slob," she said, tickling his head, "Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't any right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together. I'm not sure where that is just yet, but I know what it's like."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time, it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce friendship's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "Frequently, when he was out of town (I'd developed hostile attitudes toward him, and seldom used his name) we spent entire evenings together during which we exchanged less than a hundred words; once, we walked all the way to Chinatown, ate a chow-mein supper, bought some paper lanterns and stole a box of joss sticks, then moseyed across the Brooklyn Bridge, and on the bridge, as we watched seaward-moving ships pass between the cliffs of burning skyline, she said, "Years from now, years and years, one of those ships will bring me back, me and my nine Brazilian brats. Because yes, they must see this, these lights, the river - I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it." And I said: "Do shut up," for I felt infuriatingly left out - a tugboat in drydock while she, glittery voyager of secure destination, steamed down the harbor with whistles whistling and confetti in the air."
  • From the novel Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.
• "Home is where my friend is, and there I never go."
  • From the short story A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote.
• "While beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air."
  • From the novel Maurice by E. M. Forster.
• "He stopped up in the room till dinner, fighting with ghosts he had loved."
  • From the novel Maurice by E. M. Forster.
• "Blossom after blossom crep past them, dragged by the ungenial year: some had cankered, others would never unfold: here and there beauty triumphed, but desperately, flickering in a world of gloom."
  • From the novel Maurice by E. M. Forster.
• "He looks like an overgrown boy, exhaused from too many boyish games."
  • From the novel A Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneggar.
• "The streets are dark with salt and water. The city is soft, white, obscured by snow. Everything is beautiful. I am detached. I am a movie. We are seemingly unscathed, but sooner or later there will be hell to pay."
  • From the novel A Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneggar.
• "A terrible angel wouldn't be white, or would be whiter than any white I could make."
  • From the novel A Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneggar.
• "It's funny," I said. "It's funny. And it's a lot of fun to be in love."

"Do you think so?" her eyes looked flat again. "I don't mean fun in that way. In a way it's an enjoyable feeling." "No," she said. "I think it's hell on earth." "It's good to see each other." "No. I don't think it is." "Don't you want to?" "I have to."

• From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."
  • From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "And when you're divorced, Lady Ashley, then you won't have a title."

"No. What a pity." "No," said the count. "You don't need a title. You've got class all over you."

• From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix up emotions with a wine like that. You lose the taste."
  • From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "Here's a taxidermist's," Bill said. "Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?"

"Come on," I said. "You're pie-eyed." "Pretty nice stuffed dogs," Bill said. "Certainly brighten up your flat." "Come on." "Just one stuffed dog. I can take 'em or leave 'em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog." "Come on." "Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog." "We'll get one on the way back." "All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault."

• From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man in her horse and a woman in his grave."
  • From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?"

"After you, brother."

• From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "I went out the door and into my own room and lay on the bed. The bed went sailing off and I sat up in bed and looked at the wall to make it stop. Outside in the square the fiesta was going on. It did not mean anything."
  • From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "I got up and went to the balcony and looked out at the dancing in the square. The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright, and inclined to blur at the edges."
  • From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right."
  • From the novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
• "Make morning into a key and throw it into the well / Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly / Let the morning sun forget to rise in the East / Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly."
  • From the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
• "His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height."
  • From the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
• "In his presidential address at the annual convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality in 1968 (held that year in Mazatlan among lots of suggestive pinatas) Dr. Luce introduced the concept of "periphescence." The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a baclony on the rope of the beloved's hair. Periphescence denotes the intial drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your lover like a scented puppy for hours running. (It lasts, Dr. Luce explained, up to two years - tops.)"
  • From the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
• "Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it in some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine."
  • From the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
• "Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that beings in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever."
  • From the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
• "Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye."
  • From the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.
• "Do you know what clothes and makeup are for? Why we put them on? It's simple: just to take them off, to have something to strip away to feel naked. Clothes are there to make other people think aboue what they can't see. But that, of course, is the great joke, because when you strip off the clothes and wash off all that makeup, what do you have? Zero, that's what."
  • From the novel Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami.
• "Julia pulled off her hat and tossed it on the rack above her, and shook her night-dark hair with a sigh of ease - a sigh fit for a pillow, the sinking firelight and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of bare trees."
  • From the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
• "Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in conspiracy against us."

"They are, they are." "But we've got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we've taken possession of it. They can't hurt us now, can they?" "Not to-night; not now." "Not for how many nights?"

• From the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
• "Sometimes," said Julia, "I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all."
  • From the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
• "Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke - a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace - perhaps all of our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us."
  • From the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
• "His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word."
  • From the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
• "It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky."
  • From the novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
• "In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful, In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors."
  • Marcus Aurelius
• "My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit and I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us -- in fact, we'd promised never to smoke a whole one alone."
  • From the novel The World According to Garp by John Irving
• "If you are careful," Garp wrote, "If you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane."
  • From the novel The World According to Garp by John Irving
• "Hannibal picked up his violin again, playing to cover the chatter of the crowd, the music was frail as honey candy, but with an edge to it like glass."
  • From the novel A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly
• "He had the fanciful thought that each person moved around with the shades of themselves in the past and the future, the seed both foretelling the tall standing flower and contained within it."
  • From the novel The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
• "Mr. Cowan told me once that all night thoughts are different from day ones, that everyone knows what it is to be afraid, what it is to have doubts in the dark."
  • From the novel The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
• " Do I dream the hanging man or does he dream me?"
  • From the novel The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan
• "And in the paper-strewn kitchen in the middle of the night they talked about how strange it was, that the person you were was perhaps formed most by all that you had forgotten."
  • From the novel Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte
• "All people are insane," he said. "They will do anything at anytime and God help anybody who looks for reasons."
  • From the novel Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
• "The future you had tomorrow won't be the same future that you had yesterday."
  • From the novel Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
• "We won't ever be as young as we is tonight."
  • From the novel Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
• "My life might be little and boring, but at least it's mine -- not some assembly-line, second-hand, hand-me-down life."
  • From the novel Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
• "No matter what happens, it's always now."
  • From the novel Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
• "Within Eastern or Asian spirituality exists the concept that only an individuals ego ties him to the temporal world, wherein we experience physical reality and time. Within this concept, enlightened beings recognize this self-imposed limitation and attachment to the immediate world, and can choose to free their consciousness and travel to any place or period of history."
  • From the novel Rant by Chuck Palahniuk
• "Take this white robe. It is costly. See, my blood

Has stained it but a little. I did wrong. I know it, and repent me. If there come A time when he grows cold -- for all the race Of heroes wander, nor can any love Fix theirs for long -- Take it and wrap him in it, And he shall love again."

• Louis Morris
• "oh god it’s wonderful

to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

• Frank O’Hara (American, 1926-1966)