I'd cut up my heart for you to wear if you wanted it.
--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

And if we folks have a motto, it’s this: ‘Don’t holler — smile and bide your time.’ We’ve survived a passel of things that way, smiling and biding our time, and we’ve gotten to be experts at surviving.
--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

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

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

He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.
--Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.
--Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
--George Orwell, 1984

I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.
--Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

I loved something I made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn't see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.
--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

His love for my mother wasn't about looking back and loving something that would never change. It was about loving my mother for everything -- for her brokenness and her fleeing, for her being there right then in that moment before the sun rose and the hospital staff came in. It was about touching that hair with the side of his fingertip, and knowing yet plumbing fearlessly the depths of her ocean eyes.
--Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.
--J.D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye