- When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. - Seymour: An Introduction, J.D. Salinger
- "They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around." - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
- "When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
- Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living. - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
- I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
- When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog followed a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I cried over it… I spent my life learning to feel less. - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
- If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does. - Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
- The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars... - On the Road, Jack Kerouac
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. - Lady Windermere's Fan, Oscar Wilde
- As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I'm a wretch. But I love, love. - Satori In Paris, Jack Kerouac
- I could die for you. But I couldn't and wouldn't live for you. - The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
- The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. - Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare
- I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness. - The Stranger, Albert Camus
- The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody [...] would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls- but, my God, who beside Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that- but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God... Oh, my God, what a mind! Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don't say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I'm not sure Socrates wouldn't have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew- knew- that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddamn stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? - Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
- "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." - A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Conner
- I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. - Walden, Henry David Thoreau
- The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light. - The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- We are such stuff as dreams are made on. - The Tempest, William Shakespeare
- This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. - Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
- Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." - The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
- Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. - The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
- You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel. - Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
- Somewhere in the far north of Canada there would be snow, falling soundlessly over the Beaufort Sea, falling over the Artic without a soul to see it. What kind of weather was that, [...] and how was one to use this information except as proof that the world was too much to bear? - Man Walks Into a Room, Nicole Krauss
- *« "Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été. » - The Fall (La chute), Albert Camus
- "The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little." - The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
- "I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars." - The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
- "The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back." - The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
- "Dead men are heavier than broken hearts." - The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
- "I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights." - The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
- "Hell is other people." - No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre
- "Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves." - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- "Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost." - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- "In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine." - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- "There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." - Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- "Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script." - Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
jan 4 2009 ∞
feb 21 2011 +