“Everything that was exposed, in the end I was clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“This isn’t about winning, and in the end it isn’t about Kylee’s betrayal; it’s about finally fighting back. I wasn’t going to do it wrong again. I’d use my best tools and talents. I loved being onstage, but I was tired of acting the part of victim. I’m tired of everything and everyone pounding on me. I’m hurting worse than any person could hurt, I’m going to exploit it. I’m no nail, so screw them all.”

— Patrick Jones, Nailed

“…And so time flowed on through the darkness, deprived of advancing watch hands: time undivided and unmeasured. Once it lost its points of demarcation, time ceased being a continuous line and became instead a kind of formless fluid that expanded or contracted at will.”

— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“ If Anna was right, if a person was no more than a collection of habits, perhaps the habits were maintained only so as not to disappoint the lover that one slept beside each night. But what chance did that leave for becoming, one fine day, a wholly different being? Maybe it was he, after all, who had not been able to abide being accounted for, who had no longer wanted to be reached. Once there was a woman he loved. That was how it had begun. But from there the story might have unfolded any number of ways. Only the end was always the same: he had emptied himself of the ballast of memory and lunged weightless into the future. Alone and astonished, attempting to take with him not even a trace. In the end he had betrayed the woman he loved, and who was there who would not judge him for that? Anna, backward or forward, the name a ghost of itself. It he called her, if he could reach her now, what would there be to say? ”

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

“If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy,’ cried a young Lucas who came with his sisters, ‘I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine every day.”

— Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen

“It was wrong — she’d go to Hell and have to spend eternity in a yellow room.”

—The Accidental Human, Dakota Cassidy

“Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of compassion as she spoke. At any rate, I had caught them in my own and was clinging to them with an impulse as instinctive as that which prompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope which is thrown to him as he sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her compassionate face and her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers, had brought me the support I needed. Its effect to calm and soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixer.”

- Edward Bellany, Looking Backward

“The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”

— Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf

“It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!”

— Dirty Hands, Jean-Paul Sartre

“I finally understood what true love meant… love meant that you care for another person’s happiness more than your own, no matter how painful the choices you face might be.”

— Dear John, Nicholas Sparks

“I sometimes think that London is the world’s largest catwalk of emperors. Perhaps it always was, but in the old days we weren’t afraid to shout out, ‘You’re naked, you silly arse. You’re stark bollock-nacked.’ Today you only have to fart in the presence of a dark-haired girl from the Sunday Times, whose father is either a sacked politician or a minor poet like myself, and you’ll be puffed and profiled as the new Thackeray.”

— Ted Wallace from The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry 

“I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.”

— Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

“But I was sure of something too: it’s a lot easier to be lost than found. It’s the reason we’re always searching, and rarely discovered - so many locks, not enough keys.”

— Lock & Key, Sarah Dessen

“Love is needing someone. Love is putting up with someone’s bad qualities because they somehow complete you.”

— Sarah Dessen

“Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”

— A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.”

— “The Blindfold” by Siri Hustvedt

“That summer, Ron and Anna Mellor [Joe Strummer’s parents] traveled up to Scotland to visit Bonar Bridge, the first time they had been there in twenty years. […] When they stopped at a tiny village called Clashmore near Dornoch, Ron had Anna take a picture of him standing with mischievous pride in front of the village’s boundary sign, his torso deliberately obscuring the second syllable of the place name.”

— from Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer

“I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in some icy water chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbour. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It’s his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.”

— The Book Thief, Markus Zusak.

Lost love is still love, Eddie. It just takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t hold their hand… You can’t tousle their hair… But when those senses weaken another one comes to life… Memory… Memory becomes your partner. You hold it… you dance with it… Life has to end, Eddie… Love doesn’t.”

— Marguerite | (Five People You Meet In Heaven)

“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”

—   Mitch Albom | (Five People You Meet In Heaven)