I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
“
| — | John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America |
All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.
“
| — | Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest |
I always channel my emotions into my work. That way, I don’t hurt anyone but myself.
“
| — | Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire |
Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they’re there to make our most absurd dreams come true.
“
| — | Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind |
We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
“
| — | Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 |
It always makes me proud to love the world somehow — hate’s so easy compared.
“
| — | Jack Kerouac, Big Sur |
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful … Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
“
| — | Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being |
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
“
| — | Herman Melville, Moby Dick |
Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.
“
| — | Toni Morrison, Jazz |
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
“
| — | Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray |
But who can say what’s best? That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.
“
| — | Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood |
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
“
| — | Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady |
