Why We Broke Up

We couldn't only have magic nights buzzing through the wires. We had to have the days, too, the bright impatient days spoiling everything with their unavoidable schedules, their mandatory times that don't overlap, their loyal friends who don't get along, the unforgiven travesties torn from the wall no matter what promises are uttered past midnight, and that's why we broke up. 

~Daniel Handler

The Bell Jar

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat. 

~Sylvia Plath

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--

If one, settling a pillow by her head, 

Should say: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."

~T.S. Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Do I dare

Disturb the universe? 

~T.S. Eliot

Cadillac Moon

Big Bang. The Big

Apple, Atom's

Behind him--

no sirens 

in sight. His career

of careening

since--at six--

playing stickball

a car stole

his spleen. 

~Kevin Young

Novel

You are in love. Occupied until the month of August. 

You are in love. --Your sonnets make Her laugh. 

All your friends go off, you are ridiculous. 

~Arthur Rimbaud

Life of Pi

To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. 

~Yann Martel

For One More Day

"The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature," he said. "You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up."

I could spend a lot of time talking about my life after baseball but that pretty much says it. 

~Mitch Albom 

For One More Day

He is respecting the authority of my coach, I am respecting the authority of my father, and this is how the world makes sense, all if us behaving like men. 

~Mitch Albom

A Rose for Emily

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which has robbed her, as people will. 

~William Faulkner

For One More Day

And being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. 

So I tried to. 

It's not so much, what's the point? It's more like what's the difference? 

~Mitch Albom

For One More Day

All that happens when your dream comes true is a slow, melting realization that it wasn't what you thought. 

And it won't save you. 

~Mitch Albom

For One More Day

This is a story about a family and, as there is a ghost involved, you might call it a ghost story. But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone. 

~Mitch Albom

The Stanger

He seemed so certain about everything, didn't he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman's head. He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who'd come up empty handed. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me...It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he...What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also call themselves my brothers? Everybody was privileged.

~Albert Camus

The Stranger

And during the summations by the prosecutor and my lawyer, there was a lot said about me, maybe more about me than about my crime. 

~Albert Camus

Before I Fall

This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don't see anyone's privates. 

~Lauren Oliver

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

"But cultures are complex; one finds in them what one wants. If one wants to find cultural traits of hard work and thrift within East Asia, they are there. If you want instead to find a tendency toward blind obedience and nepotism, these too exist. Look hard enough and you will find all these traits in most cultures."

~Fareed Zakaria

An Abundance of Katherines

You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them. 

~John Green 

Le Petit Prince

"Droit devant soi on ne peut pas aller bien loin..."

~Antoine De Saint-Exupéry (said by character Le Petit Prince)

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again. 

~Azar Nafisi

Fargo

"Only a fool thinks he can save the world."

"Yeah but...you gotta try, don't you?"

~Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks)

The Fault in our Stars

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

~John Green (said by character Peter Van Houten)

Julius Caesar

Cassius: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves/ That we are underlings."

~Shakespeare 

In Cold Blood

Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat. 

~Truman Capote

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

The boasts of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Await alike the inevitable hour:

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

~Thomas Gray

Small Hands

Please forget me, you were right dear

I am cold and self-involved 

And though I'll miss you, recent lover

I am weak and therefore fold

Get distracted by my music,

Think of nothing else but art

I'll write my loneliness in poems

If I can just think how to start

Dot my i's with eyebrow pencils,

Close my eyelids, hide my eyes,

I'll be idle in my ideals

Think of nothing else but I

~Keaton Henson

Le Désert des Tartares

Drogo: I was sent here by mistake. 

Rovin: Here or elsewhere, we're all somewhere by mistake. 

~Jacques Perrin and Jean-Louis Trintignant

Sula

The Black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinews curve. 

~Toni Morrison

Anna and the French Kiss

This is home. The two of us. 

~Stephanie Perkins 

Lola and the Boy Next Door

I'm a bad person. 

No, Max is a bad person. He's difficult, he's condescending, he's jealous. 

But I'm worse. I'm a child playing dress-up, who can't even recognize herself under her own costume. 

~Stephanie Perkins 

Requiem

A path and a road for everyone...and for some, a path straight into the ground. 

~Lauren Oliver 

The Omnivore's Dilemma

"We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it's just lunch."

~Gene Kahn (written by Michael Pollan)