“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.” 

— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

"By marrying too soon, many individuals sacrifice their chance to struggle through this purgatory of solitude and search toward a greater sense of self-confidence. They glance at the world outside the family and with hardly a second thought grasp anxiously for a partner. In marriage they seek a substitute for the security of the family of origin and an escape from aloneness. What they do not realize is that moving so quickly from one family to another, they make it easy to transfer to the new marriage all their difficult experiences in the family of origin."

Augustus Napier, The Family Crucible 

“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,” said Darcy, “of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.”
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.”

— Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

“We, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts & feelings of the cosmos, we’ve begun - at last - to wonder about our origins.

Star stuff, contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion, billion, billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps - throughout the cosmos.

Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed, not just to ourselves, but also to that cosmos - ancient and vast, from which we sprang.”

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Ray Brabury (Farenheit 451)

“A little style is a good thing, but you can’t trust a person who won’t be ugly in front of you.”

—Victor LaValle, Big Machine

If there is one thing I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.
— P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

The common story of women manipulating their male partners comes from the perception that these women are not supposed to do anything with their time except think about their man. It simultaneously ignores and depends upon the fact that women would of course not have to manipulate their husbands if they had equal power and autonomy in the relationship. Because Yoko had, on a personal level, equal power in her relationship with John, the assumption simply was that she could have obtained an equal status in no way other than manipulation. John couldn’t have enjoyed being a househusband. He couldn’t have just respected Yoko as a person. She couldn’t just be financially smarter than him. And god, he couldn’t possibly have actually liked that dreadful music and art of hers! The only explanation was that somehow, she had to be tricking him.

-Cara Kulwicki

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning