"People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness."
--Betty Smith, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody. Thank you for using me, even though I didn't want to be used by anybody.
--Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens Of Titan

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
--Marilynne Robinson, Home

Peace is purchased in the currency of loss.
--Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.
--Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

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

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.
--Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
--Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children

Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’" He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake the sleepers. "But it won’t - that’s the devil," he added in the same undertone.
--Virginia Woolf, The Years

Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, i remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the grand canyon for the flying-saucer people to find was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT,
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP.
only he didn't say "doggone."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.
--Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Listen, I don't care what you say about my race, creed, or religion, Fatty, but don't tell me I'm not sensitive to beauty. That's my Achilles' heel, and don't you forget it. To me, everything is beautiful. Show me a pink sunset, and I'm limp, by God. Anything. Peter Pan. Even before the curtain goes up at Peter Pan I'm a goddamn puddle of tears.
--J.D.Salinger, Franny And Zooey

To be able to forget means sanity.
--Jack London, The Star Rover

There was a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement not used to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.
--Bret Harte, The Outcasts Of Poker Flat

Be glad you're even alive. Be furious you're going to die.
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know.
--Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world.
--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.
--Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall

In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”
Why did I cause so much pain?
Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, “No, that’s not right.”
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.
--Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear but only wildness of heart that springs from such longing.
--Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from assuming a critical attitude towards them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, hopes, ends, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seems, however outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognises it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may extend from his spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of 'Why?' 'To what end?' a man who is capable of achievement over and above the expected modicum must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans Castorp had neither one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered mediocre, though in an entirely honorable sense.
--Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Fantasy is one of the soul's brighter porcelains.
--Pat Conroy, Beach Music

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
--Jack Kerouac, On The Road

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.
--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead


Sudden Movements
My father's head has become a mystery to him.
We finally have something in common.
When he moves his head his eyes 
get big as roses filled 
with the commotion of spring. 
Not long ago he was a man 
who had tomato soup for lunch 
and dusted with the earnestness 
of a gun fight. Now he's a man 
who sits at the table trying to breathe 
in tiny bites. When they told him 
his spinal column is closing, I thought 
of all the branches he's cut 
with loppers and piled and burned 
in the fall, the pinch of the blades 
on the green and vital pulp. Surgeons 
can fuse vertebrae, a welders art, 
and scrape the ring through which 
the soul-wires flow as a dentist 
would clean your teeth. 
And still it could happen, one turn 
of his head toward a hummingbird, 
wings keeping that brittle life 
afloat, working hard against the fall, 
and he might freeze in that pose 
of astonishment, a man estranged 
from the neck down, who can only share 
with his body the silence 
he's pawned on his children as love.
--Bob Hicok

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
--William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
--David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.
--John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy Of Dunces

The moon had been lighted and was hung in a treetop.
--Stephen Crane, The Red Badge Of Courage

Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
--Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and they're pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody's be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.
--J.D.Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
--William Golding, Lord Of The Flies

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. 
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
--Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
--Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.
--Dave Eggars, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.
--Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.
--Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks: The Decline Of A Family

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.
--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

They don't make memories like that anymore.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

“I'll tell you something," she said. 'I'm not sure I ever really liked him."
"Adam?" I said. "I don't blame you." 
"Not Adam," she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. "God.”
--Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
--Robert M.Pirsig, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.
--Pat Conroy, The Prince Of Tides

What Would Freud Say?
Wasn't on purpose that I drilled 
through my finger or the nurse 
laughed. She apologized 
three times and gave me a shot 
of something that was a lusher 
apology. The person 
who drove me home 
said my smile was a smeared 
totem that followed 
his body that night as it arced 
over a cliff in a dream.
He's always flying 
in his dreams and lands 
on cruise ships or hovers 
over Atlanta with an erection.
He put me to bed and the drugs
wore off and I woke 
to cannibals at my extremities. 
I woke with a sense
of what nails in the palms 
might do to a spirit 
temporarily confined to flesh. 
That too was an accident 
if you believe Judas 
merely wanted to be loved. 
To be loved by God, 
Urban the 8th 
had heads cut off 
that were inadequately 
bowed by dogma. To be loved 
by Blondie, Dagwood
gets nothing right 
except the hallucinogenic 
architecture of sandwiches. 
He would have drilled 
through a finger too 
while making a case for books 
on home repair and health. 
Drilling through my finger's 
not the dumbest thing 
I've done. Second place 
was approaching 
a frozen gas-cap with lighter
in hand while thinking 
heat melts ice and not 
explosion kills asshole. First 
place was passing 
through a bedroom door 
and removing silk that did not
belong to my wife.
Making a bookcase is not 
the extent of my apology. 
I've also been beaten up 
in a bar for saying huevos 
rancheros in a way 
insulting to the patrons' 
ethnicity. I've also lost 
my job because lying 
face down on the couch 
didn't jibe with my employer's 
definition of home 
office. I wanted her to come
through the door on Sunday
and see the bookcase 
she'd asked me to build 
for a year and be impressed 
that it didn't lean 
or wobble even though 
I've only leaned and often 
wobbled. Now it's half
done but certainly
a better gift with its map
of my unfaithful blood. 
--Bob Hicok

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

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

Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
--William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.
--Paul Harding, Tinkers

The secret of flight is this -- you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws.
--Michael Cunningham, A Home At The End Of The World

Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides