Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.
--Stephen King, It

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
--Anne Enright, The Gathering

I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.
--Bram Stoker, Dracula

Life had gone on. It always did. that's what you learned as you got older. Time. It kept moving. You wished you could change. They were gone. They left you in a snap.
--Lee Martin, The Bright Forever

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.
--Emma Donoghue, Room

She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
--Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat. Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well. She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima. The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve. He said quietly and with great dignity, "Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.”
--Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.
--Aldous Huxley, Island

Do you not find it happens very often, that you are as gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world?
--Patrick O'Brian, Master And Commander

Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?
--Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West

One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails.
--William Styron, Darkness Visible

I want my name to mean me.
--Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time

Harsh words live in the dungeon of the heart.
--Norman Mailer, The Gospel According To The Son

She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die.
--Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
--William Styron, Sophie's Choice

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?
--Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
--George Orwell, 1984

Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing from the perspective of a convicted murderer in the song "Folsom Prison Blues,: Cash is struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears a distant train whistle. This is because people on that train are "probably drinkin' coffee." And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as a felon: He doesn't want freedom or friendship or Jesus or a new lawyer. He wants coffee. Within the mind of a killer, complex feeling are eerily simple. This is why killers can shoot men in Reno just to watch them die, and the rest of us usually can't.
--Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs And Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.
--Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived In The Castle

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.
--Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Road

But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering.
--Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country

Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.
--Stephen King, Dreamcatcher

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

Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.
--Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenhearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
--Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.
--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.
--Stephen King, The Talisman

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."
"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.
"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."
"What was that?"
He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
--Michael Cunningham, A Home At The End Of The World

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

I do believe that there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.
--Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed

See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
--Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy." 
..."What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.” 
--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
--Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold?
--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

She used to make me wonder why God had ever gone to all the trouble of creating reality.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.
--Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

A life you don't live is still lost.
"Before It's Too Late,"  Goo Goo Dolls

There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.
--Kate Chopin, The Awakening

He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.
--F.Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The NIght

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

Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories.
--Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry

When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used to fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted onto pinions, our spines soldered into cast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how, finally, we were joined.
--Paul Harding, Tinkers

There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours

You can still die when the sun is shining.
--James Joyce, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.
--Robert Graves, I, Claudius

She turned; she bruised under her heel the scaly head of this dark suspicion-as terrifying to her as his guilt was to him. 'O Absalom, my Absalom! Come, come, we will not entertain such a thought. God himself would not urge it upon a mother.'
--Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
--William Golding, Lord Of The Flies

The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.'
--Willa Cather, Death Comes For The Archbishop