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

The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.
--Stephen King, Different Seasons

Child, it's a very bad thing for a woman to face the worst that can happen to her, because after she's faced the worst she can't ever really fear anything again. 
--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

Have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
--Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?
--James Joyce, The Dead

Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
--Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

You are a pearl of great price to me, but there are times when you are an almighty trial to those who love you.
--Charles Portis, True Grit

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.
--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

If a thing loves, it is infinite.
--William Blake

What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
--Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
--Jeffrey Eugenides,
​ Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
--James Joyce,