Monday, September 26




“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life’s bittersweet route.”
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume


“She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.”



— Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.



— William Faulkner, Mosquitoes: A Novel


“Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.” 
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady




The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!”
— Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility


I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your own.”Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart.
—Jeffrey Eugenides  (My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead)



"Books were where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us." 
Ray Bradbury 


“This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out, that you will never become a different man; that even if there were still time and faith enough to change yourself, you probably would not even wish to change; and if you wished, you would do nothing about it anyway, because, in fact, there is perhaps nothing to change to.” 
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground





The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by an invader. the mind is a complex and many-layered thing.
Severus Snape (J.K. Rowling)





"...she felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. she sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on… far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."
Virginia Woolf 


“At heart, he could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be—inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away.”
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley


You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.” 




— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity






George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.”
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man





“You like someone who can’t like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.”
— John Green (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)