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

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

That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours

How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.
--Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

What humanity was about to lose, though, except for one tiny colony on Santa Rosalia, was what the trackless sea could never lose, so long as it was made of water, the ability to heal itself.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

If you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one.
--J.D.Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw — the sky. I saw the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time time to sit and smoke.
--Arthur Miller, Death Of A Salesman

Words betrayed her: beautiful butterflies in her mind; dead moths when she opened her mouth for their release into the world.
--Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
--Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West

There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
--John Steinbeck, East Of Eden

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses.
--John Irving, The Cider House Rules

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.
--F.Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful And Damned

Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. Virginia imagines someone else, yes, someone strong of body but frail-minded; someone with a touch of genius, of poetry, ground under by the wheels of the world, by war and government, by doctors; a someone who is, technically speaking insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere, knows that trees are sentient beings and sparrows sing in Greek. Yes, someone like that. Clarissa, sane Clarissa -exultant, ordinary Clarissa - will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die.
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours

The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.
--Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.
--Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

Well she was bright; and she danced...And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.
--Ford Madox Ford, The Good Solider

We are most artistically caged.
--Vladimir Nabakov, Pale Fire

I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.
--Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle

        How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richards kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.
        Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.
        Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe its as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the ponds edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.
        It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November.
--Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours

The Earthlings behaved at all times as though there were a big eye in the sky—as though that big eye were ravenous for entertainment. 
--Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens Of Titan

Nobody's perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him...
--Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
--William Golding, Lord Of The Flies

If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.
--Neil Gaimen, Good Omens: The Nice And Accurate Prophecies By Anges Nutter, Witch

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
--Harper Lee,To Kill A Mockingbird

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so..
--Michael Cunningham, The Hours