Stephen King, If It Bleeds
“Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.”
“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dies near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
Madeline Miller, Circe
“How very odd to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.”
John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
“… suffice to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.”
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“I think you are the cats pajamas.”
Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
“Ah, this morning! You have lived since then.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“But almost everything is inherited. It’s not about deserving. It’s about what you do with what you have.”
Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on its evidence. There is no better rule.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
“And since I don’t know you, I figure that maybe I can write about something that you can related to.”
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“Her heart was a river that carried her to the sea.”
Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom
“‘You get used to it,’ he said, though it wasn’t exactly true. It was just a thing to say when the truth was too hard to explain.”
Jennifer Smith, This is What Happy Looks Like
“They had an ordinary life full of ordinary things– if love can ever be called that.”
Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising
“Because the voices in your head that say otherwise are just fear talking. Never listen to fear.”
Jay Kristoff, Godsgrave
“Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
John Green, Turtles all the Way Down
“Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”
David Levithan, Every Day
“Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess, and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.”
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
“To be, in a word, unborable… It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before and people continue to disappoint them.”
Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
“She was as black as the ace of spades and as beautiful as the sin you never had enough nerve to commit.”
Stephen King, The Green Mile
“Weird love’s better than no love at all.”
Stephen King, The Green Mile
“For the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.”
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
“She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.”
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
“In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot the defective can be more than the entire.”
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
“As a humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never have given us bombs.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect
“You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small, OK?”
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
“All moments past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
“There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listlesss playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
“After that I did not tell her about my dreams, and they remained in me forever and ever…”
Rudolfo Anaya, Bless me, Ultima
“A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
John Shedd
“I know that if I am hit where I am earnest, I will never recover.”
John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed
“Their pulses pounded in time with each other, a single heartbeat holding hands with itself.”
Jay Kristoff, Stormdancer
“Eventually that starts to wear on you, and you stop leaving your apartment, and you become a shut-in, and the only way to job yourself loose from your other life, from every detail of your life, is to abandon it.”
Jen Silverman, We Play Ourselves
“Everybody thinks the whole point is to be happy, but happy is a show you put on for other people.”
Jen Silverman, We Play Ourselves
“When I was six years old, I painted a corner of the sky.”
Jodi Picoult, Wish You Were Here
“To see the ocean once is to learn how to miss it.”
Patrick Ness, The Ask and the Answer
“And it feels like, finally.”
Patrick Ness, Monsters of Men
“Janos Slynt was a butchers son, and he laughed like a man chopping meat.”
George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
“When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.”
George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason — if you pick the proper postulates.”
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
“Love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.”
Stephen King, Night Shift
“Hope in the shadow of fear is the world’s most powerful motivator.”
Neal Schusterman, Scythe
“I can’t bear saints: just be a simple, honest, respectable boy and we’ll never desert you.”
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women