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“When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“How I hate everything!”
― Edith Wharton, Summer

“Good manners apart, though, the appearance of those monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suède.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Tancredi, in an attempt to link gallantry with greed, tried to imagine himself tasting, in the aromatic forkfuls, the kisses of his neighbour Angelica, but he realised at once that the experiment was disgusting and suspended it, with a mental reserve about reviving this fantasy with the pudding”
― Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, sons and daughters of the archetypes, images that could not be certain which of two confusions held less terror, their own or what their own might become if it ever faced the truth. I drove at insane speeds.”
― Don DeLillo, ´¡³¾Ã©°ù¾±³¦²¹²Ô²¹

“But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know.”
― Henry James, The Golden Bowl

“and she loved him still; but the pleasure of shouting “It’s your faultâ€� being the strongest any human being can enjoy, all truths and all feelings were swept along in its wake.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.”
― Mircea Eliade, Le Roman de l'adolescent myope

“And it's finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for "cities" at last, you dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings'll unfold like Paris but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillnes in the wilds- So I tell myself "Be Wise.”
― Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

“She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations—but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw her down into them; and, above all, the flush of youth and tenderness in which his words enclosed her. Now she saw him detached from her, drawn back into the unknown, and whispering to another girl things that provoked the same smile of mischievous complicity he had so often called to her own lips. The feeling possessing her was not one of jealousy: she was too sure of his love. It was rather a terror of the unknown, of all the mysterious attractions that must even now be dragging him away from her, and of her own powerlessness to contend with them.”
― Edith Wharton, Summer

“I began drinking because the thought that I was drinking gave me a kind of identity: each time I poured myself a brandy in the deserted afternoon I could say to myself 'I am a woman who drinks.”
― Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater

“Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?”
― George Eliot

“I love three things, I then say. I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.

And which do you love best?

The dream.”
― Knut Hamsun, Pan

“To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead. I am drawn, irrevocably, towards this death which is perhaps mine as well. Each instant appears only as part of a sequence. I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable -- and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. This last moment I am spending -- in Berlin, in London -- in the arms of a woman casually met two days ago -- moment I love passionately, woman I may adore -- all is going to end, I know it. Soon I shall leave for another country. I shall never rediscover either this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“But no moral philosopher, from Aristotle to Aquinas, to John Locke and Adam Smith, divorced economics from a set of moral ends or held the production of wealth to be an end in itself; rather it was seen as a means to the realization of virtue, a means of leading a civilized life.”
― Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive.”
― E. E. Cummings

“Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.”
― Douglas Adams

“I know that's what people say-- you'll get over it. I'd say it, too. But I know it's not true. Oh, youll be happy again, never fear. But you won't forget. Every time you fall in love it will be because something in the man reminds you of him.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, All the Sad Young Men

“He went on for some time while I sat listening in silence because I knew he was right, and like two people who have loved each other however imperfectly, who have tried to make a life together, however imperfectly, who have lived side by side and watched the wrinkles slowly form at the corner of the other's eyes, and watched a little drop of gray, as if poured from a jug, drop into the other's skin and spread itself evenly, listening to the other's coughs and sneezes and little collected mumblings, like two people who'd had one idea together and slowly allowed that idea to be replaced with two separate, less hopeful, less ambitious ideas, we spoke deep into the night, and the next day, and the next night. For forty days and forty nights, I want to say, but the fact of the matter is it only took three. One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn't, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.”
― Nicole Krauss

“All love is alike, knowing no season, sun, or clime, but that damn sun does represent loversâ€� ever-changing time. Why does it rise to show lovers nothing lasts? Does it not see those lovers and think, ‘I can eclipse and darken them with a wink. I could kill all love by rising and sending them to their forlorn pasts. I can make them for each other pine, and wait and wait as I rise and set. HA! Buffoons, they are all mine. And every time I shine they owe me a debt.”
― Bruce Crown, The Romantic and The Vile

“But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life”
― Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

“Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each day was so rich that it absorbed her....”
― Edith Wharton, Summer

“She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough; it could not buy more than a few moments...”
― Edith Wharton, Summer

“Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn't with him.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.”
― Lemony Snicket, The End

“You see, there are some people that one loves, and others that perhaps one would rather be with.”
― Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“Oh, how unbearable is a happy person sometimes!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights