- "That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from everyone. You Belong." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- "When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm. The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you have." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (Bernice Bobs her Hair)
- "Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man." -- Vladimir Nabokov
- "I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing." -- Agatha Christie
- “There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest." -- Anaïs Nin
- "If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be." -- Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)
- "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -- George Eliot
- "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
- "Your head is a living forest full of song birds." -- E.E. Cummings
- "This is why I read novels, so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue." -- Carol Shields (Unless)
- "Simplicity and sincerity generally go hand in hand, as both proceed from a love of truth." -- Mary Wollstonecraft
- "There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands." -- Oscar Wilde
- "I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time." -- Banksy
- "So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them." - Sylvia Plath
- "I’m going to read what I want, listen to what I want and watch French films and I’m going to talk to people who know lots about lots." -- An Education
- "Perhaps the most tragic thing about mankind is that we are all dreaming about some magical garden over the horizon, instead of enjoying the roses that are right outside today." -- Andrew Carnegie
- "An entire sea of water can’t sink a ship unless it gets inside the ship. Similarly, the negativity of the world can’t put you down unless you allow it to get inside you." -- Goi Nasu
- "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." -- Virginia Woolf
- "Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who don't write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation." -- Graham Greene
- "Well, I think the way you feel as a teenager stays with you, forever. I really believe that. And we try to change and we hope that we change, but we don’t really in big ways, in serious ways. I think the personality is formed at that time, for the good and for the bad. … We all want to grow up and move on and appear to be different to people. And we want people to see us in a different way. But, I don’t know, I think the personality is very, very strongly cemented, and we just bear whatever shortcomings we have and learn to live with it." -- Morrissey
- "It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- "When I’m really into a novel, I’m seeing the world differently during that time — not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I’m actually walking around in a bit of a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism." -- Colin Firth
- "I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish." -- Markus Zusak
- "With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?" -- Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
- "I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel." -- Audrey Hepburn
- "And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long." -- Sylvia Plath
- "It is one of the defects of my character that I cannot altogether dislike anyone who makes me laugh." -- W. Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence)
- "To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves." -- Federico Garcia Lorca (Blood Wedding)
- "It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
- "I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness. And yet I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them." -- Frédéric Chopin
- "Också den som älskar vet att kärleken är dödens syster." -- Stig Dagerman (Ormen)
- "I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else." -- Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
- "Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle." -- Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)
- "You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon." -- Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
aug 19 2011 ∞
jul 20 2013 +