Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.—Jane Austen, Emma

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him. 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved.”

— Charles Bukowski, Factotum 

“I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.”
— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many.” 

— Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“It makes me angry sometimes, it’s a visceral thing—how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren’t genuine, but because they are; because you’ve said them so many times, your ‘principles,’ your ‘ideals’—and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.” 
— Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water

“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

— Ian McEwan, Atonement