If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

They weren't penitent over what they'd attempted; their sorrow reached to the limits of their bodies and no further, all their anguish was in their skin.
--Ron Hansen, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

And remember this: take the hard road, not the easy one. The road that leads to life is a hard one, and it passes through a narrow gate, but the road to destruction is easy, and the gate is broad. Plenty take the easy road; few take the hard one. Your job is to find the hard one, and go by that.
--Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ

I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.
--Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

Father Haynes: He is in God's hands, now.
Mrs. O'Brien: He was in God's hands the whole time. Wasn't he?
"Tree Of Life" 2011

I feel like there's something terrible and wonderful and amazing that's just beyond my grasp. I have dreams about it. I do dream, by the way. It hovers over me at odd moments. And then it's gone. I feel like I'm always on the brink of something that never arrives. I want to either have it or be free of it.
---Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days

She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
--Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House In The Big Woods

Love is never any better than the lover. 
--Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.
--Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True

You have my whole heart. You always did.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. 
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky 
And the affrighted steed ran on alone, 
Do not weep. 
War is kind. 

Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, 
Little souls who thirst for fight, 
These men were born to drill and die. 
The unexplained glory flies above them, 
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -- 
A field where a thousand corpses lie. 

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind. 
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches, 
Raged at his breast, gulped and died, 
Do not weep. 
War is kind. 

Swift blazing flag of the regiment, 
Eagle with crest of red and gold, 
These men were born to drill and die. 
Point for them the virtue of slaughter, 
Make plain to them the excellence of killing 
And a field where a thousand corpses lie. 

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button 
On the bright splendid shroud of your son, 
Do not weep. 
War is kind. 

--Stephen Crane

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

But see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.
--Stephen King, The Shining

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
--F.Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The NIght

Did you ever have a sister? did you?
--William Faulkner, The Sound And The Fury

What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream?
--Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.
--Christopher Moore, Fluke: Or, I Know Why The Winged Whale Sings

It was wrong to do this,' said the angel. 
'You should live like a flower, 
Holding malice like a puppy, 
Waging war like a lambkin.' 

'Not so,' quoth the man 
Who had no fear of spirits; 
'It is only wrong for angels 
Who can live like the flowers, 
Holding malice like the puppies, 
Waging war like the lambkins.'
--Stephen Crane

There were so many different ways to be beautiful.
--Michael Cunningham, A Home At The End Of The World

It’s more that I’m afraid of time. And not having enough of it. Time to figure out who I’m supposed to be… to find my place in the world before I have to leave it. I’m afraid of what I’ll miss.
--Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.
--F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful And The Damned

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?
--Jennifer Egan, A Visit From The Goon Squad

The smell of peace is abroad, the air is cold, the skies are brittle, and the leaves have finally fallen. I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple thread-like chain of lapis lazulis and pearls. On my face is softness and content like a veil of golden moonlight. And I have never in all my lives been so lonely.
--Erik Larson, In The Garden Of Beasts: Love Terror, And An American Family In Hitler's Berlin

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

I met a reverend mother once who cried...'ah, it's all so sad' 
- 'What did she cry about?' 
- 'I don't know, after talking to me, I remember I said some silly thing like "the universe is a woman because it's round" but I think she cried because she was remembering her early days when she had a romance with some soldier who died, at least that's what they say, she was the greatest woman I ever saw, big blue eyes, big smart woman ... you could do that, get out of this awful mess and leave it all behind.
--Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him: "Why?" He replied: "Because no one admired me."
--Stephen Crane, Complete Poems Of Stephen Crane

So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.
--James Joyce, Dubliners

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.
--Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

They like life alright, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.
--John Steinbeck, East Of Eden

They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.
--Betty Smith, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.
--Paul Harding, Enon

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. 
--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

You're doomed at being you.
--Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

I realized that there may very well be some duplicates of passages on here; be forgiving.

I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she'd gone.
--Chris Adrian, Gob's Grief

Wonder. Go on and wonder.
--William Faulkner, The Sound And The Fury

I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.
--Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

This is man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy and happiness out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care, unseamed by aches or itches, has power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say: "I have lived upon this earth and known glory!"
--Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.
--Pat Conroy, Beach Music

You're the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, 'I love you.' And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don't want my square of toilet paper.'
I didn't realize it was toilet paper.
--Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.
--Toni Morrison, Beloved

I'll never be ready. Yet at the same time, you always want to reach the end. You can't fly to a destination and linger in the air. I want to reach the end of this thing, and I feel terrible about it.
--Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants

Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn't make…. Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out. We're both being someone new now, someone incredible.
--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

 And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
--Kathryn Stockett, The Help

 I guess that's what the kid feels - She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.
--Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it. 
--Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.
--Cormac McCarthy, Cities Of The Plain

Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like a state of grace.
--Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account Of The Mt. Everest Disaster

How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls. 
--William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

They are asleep. This is the condition they prefer. They are afraid of the world and sleep is a way of dealing with their fear. Someday they will wake. Perhaps something frightful will happen. Indeed, there is no better invitation to the frightful than ignorance - that is, sleep. 
--Stephen Dobyns, The Church Of Dead Girls

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
--Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.
--Donna Tartt, The Secret History