Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays
This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.
Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
Kids can handle a lot more than you think they can. It’s when they get to be grown up that you have to start worrying.
Anne Ursu, Breadcrumbs
Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Don’t ever think that just because you do things differently, you’re wrong.
Gail Tsukiyama, Woman of the Silk
People like you to be something, preferably what they are.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Like all of my friends, she’s a lousy judge of character.
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day
But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us.
Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
