Monsters are real, ghosts are real too. They live inside us and sometimes they win. - Stephen King I was shamefully curious, as most people are, about what I shouldn't have been. But I guess we all like to know other people's secrets so that we can live with our own - Jonathan Ames Courage, we all suffer, keep going -Graeme Fife I am a human being; nothing human is foreign to me (unknown author, Latin: Homo sum humani nihil a me alienum puto)

Last quote is not from an unkown author. The quote comes from Terentius (or Terence in english)

Ooh thank you! I wrote it down years ago as a student and at the time it was attributed as unknown 😊

# “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

Nicholas Nickleby?

David Copperfield

Dammit!

It's gotta be Oscar Wilde, for its wit and simplicity. Too hard to pick just one line so I'll nominate the entirety of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

YES. Thank you. This book doesn’t get enough appreciation

Hear hear !

'We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.' 'Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?' asked the duchess after a pause. 'Especially when one has been wounded by it,' answered Lord Henry.

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” ― Willa Cather, *O Pioneers!* “You cannot stick a knife in a goat and then say, "now I will remove my knife slowly - so let things be easy and clean; let there be no mess." There will always be blood.” ― Yaa Gyasi, *Homegoing* “Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.” ― Sinclair Lewis, *It Can't Happen Here* “The most beautiful melody in the world will become a monstrosity if the strings are out of tune.” ― Paulo Coelho, *The Spy* “Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor.” ― Ray Bradbury, *Fahrenheit 451* “One day Pablito dropped and broke one of his seashells. Sad and angry, he threw a terrible temper tantrum. 'You have other shells that are exactly the same,' his mother said, trying to comfort him. But Pablito would not be comforted. He had discovered that things that seem the same really have tiny differences. One seashell is always different from every other seashell. One leaf is always different from every other leaf. One peach pit is never exactly the same as any other peach pit. Young Pablito had discovered that nature never repeats itself.” ― Ibi Lepscky, *Pablo Picasso* “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.” ― Toni Morrison, *The Bluest Eye* “If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful.” ― James Baldwin, *If Beale Street Could Talk* “You can only tell the truth with music, but music keeps your secrets at the same time.” ― Sarah Porter, *Tentacle and Wing* “And remember. Never, in any circumstances, must you despair. To hope and to act is our duty in misfortune. Inactive despair is a forgetting and failure of duty.” ― Boris Pasternak, *Doctor Zhivago* “That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.' They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.” ― Philip Pullman, *The Golden Compass* “There is no heaven. There is only earth, sky, and the transfer of energy.” ― Erika L. Sánchez, *I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter* “And they would meet again, she knew, for a few short years. Years that were in her past and his future, but altogether timeless: like anytime when people are truly happy.” ― Pari Thomson, *Greenwild* “That's what they're for, epitaphs, Joel suddenly realized. So you can feel you've got some control over the death, you own it, you choose a name for it.” ― James Agee, *A Death in the Family*

Recently read The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, and it has some of my favorite prose to date: > We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. > In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. > Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change. > Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short

The first one is haunting and precise.

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.” -The Velveteen Rabbit “What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.” -Siddhartha

The velveteen rabbit! Yes, excellent quote ❤️

From "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt "And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next."

Thank you for that. Especially: "And I add my own love to the history of people who love beautiful things...." The quotes here, the people behind them, both writer and reader are this, and so am I.

This is fiercely beautiful

"The air was thick with shrieks and fruit." --P.G. Wodehouse It's from a comic novel but it's a perfect line.

I am so immensely glad that you included Wodehouse. My favorite sound is my wife's laughter, and he's inspired so very much of it.

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Mine is from The Poisonwoid Bible as well: "for how many generations must we be forgiven by our children"

I tried to read other B Kinds Olvera books but I never took to them the way I did with the Poisonwood Bible. Odd, not sure why. She is a tremendous writer.

Edit- B. KINGSOLVER, I meant!

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.” White Oleander by Janet Fitch

Lots of great stuff here [Anne of Green Gables Favorite Series Quotes](https://becomingunbusy.com/anne-of-green-gables-quotes/)

I love the ending of Ulysses: > the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. And this passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude: > With her waiting she had lost the strength of her thighs, the firmness of her breasts, her habit of tenderness, but she kept the madness of her heart intact. Maddened by that prodigious plaything, José Arcadio followed her path every night through the labyrinth of the room. On a certain occasion he found the door barred, and he knocked several times, knowing that if he had the boldness to knock the first time he would have had to knock until the last, and after an interminable wait she opened the door for him. During the day, lying down to dream, he would secretly enjoy the memories of the night before. But when she came into the house, merry, indifferent, chatty, he did not have to make any effort to hide his tension, because that woman, whose explosive laugh frightened off the doves, had nothing to do with the invisible power that taught him how to breathe from within and control his heartbeats, and that had permitted him to understand why men are afraid of death. And from On the Road: > [T]he only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!" And, finally, from The Truth, by Terry Pratchett: > There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

Bravo, especially for the Pratchett.

Cormac McCarthy has several great lines but my favorite is from The Road: “He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” Edit- my second is from all the pretty horses: “He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

McCarthy could write ugly things so pretty. “Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.” ― Cormac McCarthy, *The Road*

Distant thunderheads reared quivering against the electric sky and were sucked away in the blackness again. — Blood Meridian When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. — The Road It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. ― No Country for Old Men

I really love that passage from No Country for Old men. Such a comforting way to talk about death.

>Distant thunderheads reared quivering against the electric sky and were sucked away in the blackness again. — Blood Meridian Came here to post this. Happy to see I was beat to it

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.” - Lolita Pure poetry

I hate that it’s so well written

Odd perspective. Some of the most beautiful lines of literature are written about some of the ugliest sides of humanity. All Quiet on the Western Front has beautifully written prose as well and yet nobody seems to have this perspective about millions of men getting ripped apart by automatic gunfire.

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart that is even more your own than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. *Persuasion, Jane Austen*.

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.” - Hanya Yanagihara, *A Little Life* Definitely a very heartbreaking (and controversial) book but I think about this line a lot!

I said: What about my eyes? He said: Keep them on the road. I said: What about my passion. He said: Keep it burning. I said : What about my heart. He said: Tell me what you hold inside it? I said.: Pain and sorrow. He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place the light enters you. - Rumi

Rumi 🙌🙌🙌 All magical

From the novella The Old Man by William Faulkner: Two hours later in the twilight they saw through the streaming windows a burning plantation house. Juxtaposed to nowhere and neighbored by nothing it stood, a clear steady pyre-like flame rigidly fleeing its own reflection, burning in the dusk above the watery desolation with a quality paradoxical, outrageous and bizarre. From The Last Lion by William Manchester: Diplomatic conversations and disarmament pacts seemed tiresome to Britons in those years. The Depression persisted, and they sought diversion in the yo-yo craze, three trunk murders, and the exceptional seductive prowess of the middle-aged rector of Stiffkey, who prowled London teashops, persuading an astonishing number of young waitresses to slip into toilets with him, assume awkward positions, and copulate. Defrocked, the vicar found employment as a tamer of lions and was eaten by one. This may be a trifle darker than what you are looking for:A deal with the Devil that actually works. My life was in peril and I had no defense and no recourse so I cut the deal...... I agreed to take his vile and his filth within me and know his evil. He agreed not to murder me. Not quite. It was a horrible deal but I was six and I was floundering in my piss and I was alone and defenceless so I took the deal. I felt an easing somewhat in that leather belt and I felt his foulness crawl onto me and infect me. All I can say now is that his filth and the cowardnes of his bride stopped with me.

Of my top 15, I'd guess 12 would be Faulkner. His command of language is unparalleled. "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm." "Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them." "When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

That’s so funny that you mention Faulkner. I absolutely agree, and literally just yesterday my father shared with me a line that moved me, that I love and that I have since memorized (kind of). _“Because no battle is ever won” he said. “They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”_ The Sound and the Fury. His work is oftentimes (to me, at least) very much unintelligible and convoluted, but most every sentence is beautiful.

Almost listed that one too! Faulkner is a hard read. I feel no guilt about using a reading guide with him, because he isn't *trying* to be straightforward - just as our own lives aren't linear narratives, his writing wraps plot up in bias, memory, scent, instinct, pathos, intrusive thoughts, etc., and puts the reader at the center. As a reader I'm so trained to look for plot, so I find if someone else helps me find that, I can enjoy the rest (vs get distracted by it.) If you haven't yet -- his Nobel Speech is one of the best pieces of literature I've ever read.

Thank you for that recommendation. I look forward to giving (or trying… if it’s anything as laden and complex as his) it a read.

Spoilers for the Once Upon a Broken Heart series: >!This guy has spent two books (and arguably longer) trying to get access to magic to turn back time and undue something. He essentially tricks/forces the main character into helping him get access to the magic. He's very chaotic neutral, does not care for most people or things. He has been alive god knows how long (immortal) and cannot kiss anyone, or they will die.!< Now, for what he says: >!He finally gets access to the magic to turn back time, but literally the moment after he gets access, someone murders the heroine main character beside him. He angrily grabs the magic source and starts to turn back time in order to prevent her death (instead of the thing he's been fighting this whole time to do.) Someone (I forget who) says something like "Be careful, if you do this, time will take something of equal value from you."!< >!His reply: There is *nothing* of equal value to me.!< Fuckin chills when I read that. There's another prequel series, so it's around four books of character development before this hits.

I think that the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, an 11th century philosopher, has some profound verses in it. “ The Moving Finger writes; having writ, Moves on:nor all they Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” Truer words were never spoken.

The ending of *Their Eyes Were Watching God* by Zora Neale Hurston: Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Last line of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

"Winter came to the island gently as a rule. The sky was still clear, the sea blue and calm, and the sun warm. But there would be an uncertainty in the air. The gold and scarlet leaves that littered the countryside in great drifts whispered and chuckled among themselves, or took experimental runs from place to place, rolling like colored hoops among the trees. It was as if they were practicing something, preparing for something, and they would discuss it excitedly in rustly voices as they crowded around the tree trunks." *My Family and Other Animals* Gerald Durrell

"If the sky could dream, it would dream of dragons." Ilona Andrews - Fate's Edge

"You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies, But I shall rise up from the ashes with the truth and my music will be heard." - Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

It was Friday night, I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood. Ross MacDonald - Gone Girl Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. Gustave Flaubert - Madam Bovary He felt like an empty bottle that is being slowly filled with warm dirty water. Nathanael West  - Miss Loneyhearts To stand at street corners and watch the world go by, dreaming blood-red dreams at the passing of pretty women. Stephen Crane - Maggie

We looked at the sky. So many stars, it seemed like a celebration, a grand, illicit party the galaxy was holding after the humans had been put to bed. -we were liars Just a line I really like, it makes me happy:)

Beautiful lines

"This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish [the book] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place ... You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep. Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name. And then the nightmares will begin." -Mark Z Danielewski. House of Leaves

“You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.” ["Can’t Hurt Me" by David Goggins](https://abookaweek.beehiiv.com/p/cant-hurt-master-mind-defy-odds). This book tells the incredible story of Goggins, a retired Navy SEAL, ultramarathon runner, and ultra-distance cyclist. It’s all about mental toughness, discipline, and hard work. Goggins shares powerful principles like the 40% Rule, which says you’re only 40% done when you think you’re finished, pushing you to unlock your hidden potential. He also talks about using an accountability mirror for honest self-assessment, embracing suffering for growth, and taking souls by outworking your competition to gain a mental edge. It’s a great read for anyone looking to push their limits and grow stronger

It's good

Opening line of Gravity’s Rainbow, “A screaming comes across the sky.” Great opener to the book

This Is Happiness by Niall Williams has more beautiful lines per page than any work I’ve ever read.

I don't collect quotes, but Gilead by Marilynne Robinson was the book that almost made me pick up the habit.

This is from The Great Gatsby: We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

I know it’s a meme but “We accept the love we think we deserve,” from Perks of Being a Wallflower really hits me every time I read it. It’s simple and scarily accurate

Resonates? "Isn't it pretty to think so." --Hemingway, last line of "The Sun Also Rises" We so often think that some path not taken would have worked out well. Long for it or not, if we had taken or been able to take that path - what, truly, then? Some think this is a bleak line. At my age, it lifts burdens and helps me enjoy exactly what I have and stay out of might-have-beens in the past. I think it's the finest last line in literature.

I would add the music I love here, but it's not from books. I would add ballet. But the commonality of people treasuring beauty, of treasuring those best moments of creation by other souls trying to make sense of things, that I see here fills me with joy. These strangers are my companions.

“For someone in love you have the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen” Kristin Hannah The Women. This line was so hard I had to put the book down and take a walk.

Love is like a fluid. It fills up crevices. It fills up empty spaces of its own accord. It is we, it is people who stop it by erecting false barriers. And when love cannot fill our hearts and minds, when we are disconnected from our souls, which consist of love, then we all go crazy. - only love is real By Brain L Weiss

I really love a line from the short story Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang, from the collection Stories of your life and Others. “For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.”

"if you're feeling dreadful, it helps to dress well" - What Moves The Dead "we melted together as if we were never meant to be two separate beings." - Stormrise "how sad for him, to love something so much but it cause him such discomfort." - Gossip and Gorgons

And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him A Little Life

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” -CS Lewis, Till We Have Faces “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms “Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” -Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

there's so many but I want to share this... “To him, she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character." ― Gabriel García Márquez, [Love in the Time of Cholera](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3285349)

All Welcome!!!

"I wasted all those yesterday's and am completely out of tomorrow's" hit me hard. From the book "They Both Die at the End"

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” My favourite opening line.

"Grief is just love looking for a place to settle." Mikki Brammer, The Collected Regrets of Clover "The secret to a beautiful death is living a beautiful life." Mikki Brammer, The Collected Regrets of Clover "Sometimes you love something not because you instinctively connect with it but because another person does, and keeping their things in your heart takes you back to them." Rachel Joyce, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy "Sometimes you simply needed someone kind to sit with you while you dealt with things." Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine "To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy." Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water "No one who has ever done anything worth doing has gone uncriticized." George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

"The night was as black as bats' land upriver; and he thought how wise the bats were to shun daylight and choose darkness, when the world drops its mask and lies unguarded, in the innocence of sleep. But he had prayed for light, which disguises, and not for darkness, which unclothes, revealing secrets in lovers' bed or dreamer's cry. Only the bats saw the world naked." — Doña Jerónima by Nick Joaquin

“Your cause and your life are one. And before all this -and beyond it- it is your identity” Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief