• natalie goldberg, writing down the bones

"we talked about our voices as writers - how they are strong and brave but how as people we are wimps. this is what creates our craziness. the chasm between the great love we feel for the world when we sit and write about it and the disregard we give it in our own human lives."

• antoine de saint-exupery, the little prince

"and when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. you will always be my friend. you will want to laugh with me. and you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... and your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! then you will say to them, 'yes, the stars always make me laugh!' and they will think you are crazy. it will be a very shabby trick that i shall have played on you."

• chuck palahniuk, choke

“i admire addicts. in a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. he’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise.”

• f. scott fitzgerald, the great gatsby

“he had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. it faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. it understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

• mitch albom, for one more day

"but there's a story behind everything. how a picture got on a wall. how a scar got on your face. sometimes the stories are simple and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. but behind all your stories is always your mother's story because hers is where yours begins."

• richard flanagan, the unknown terrorist

"jesus is an especially sad example of this unequal struggle. the innocent heart of jesus could never have enough human love. he demanded it, as nietzsche observed, with hardness, with madness, and had to invent hell as punishment for those who withheld their love from him. in the end, he created a god who was 'wholly love' in order to excuse the hopelessness and failure of the human heart."

• alan moore, watchmen

"yes. anybody in the world...but the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget...i forget. we gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. yet seen from the another's vantage point. as if new, it may still take our breath away. come...dry your eyes. for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly." (dr. manhattan)

"dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. this city is afraid of me. i have seen its true face. the streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. the accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'save us!' and i'll look down, and whisper 'no.' (rorshach)

• elizabeth gilbert, eat, pray, love

"so be lonely… learn your way around loneliness. make a map of it. sit with it, for once in your life. welcome to the human experience. but never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings."

• stephen king, dark tower: the gunslinger

but the man in black persisted as if roland hadn't spoken. "shall there be truth between us, as two men? not as friends, but as equals? there is an offer you will get rarely, roland. only equals speak the truth, that's my thought on't. friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard. how tiresome!"

• nicole krauss, the history of love

"once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend the rest of his life answering. when they were ten he asked her to marry him. when they were eleven he kissed her for the first time. when they were thirteen they got into a fight and for three weeks they didn’t talk. when they were fifteen she showed him the scar on her left breast. their love was a secret they told no one. he promised her he would never love another girl as long as he lived. what if i die? she asked. even then, he said."

• dennis lehane, coronado

"when you were alone, the happiness of others boiled your insides. beauty seemed ugly. laughter seemed evil. the casual grazing of one lover's hand into another was enough to make you want to cut them off at the wrist. i will never be loved, you said. i will never know joy."