“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”

“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

“People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but it's the way you live your life that matters.”

“If a relationship can't survive the long term, why would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?”

“To the stars who listen—and the dreams that are answered.”

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”

“I was smiling yesterday, I am smiling today, and I will smile tomorrow. Simply because life is too short to cry for anything.”

“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers I have read, all the people I have met, all the women I have loved, and all the cities I have visited.”

“Do you think I'm pretty?”

“Learn to light a candle in the darkest moments of someone’s life. Be the light that helps others see; it is what gives life its deepest significance.”

“How did you die?”

“People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than for being right.”

“You know, there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will.”

“There are no happy endings.”

“A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it.”

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”

“Why is it I feel I've known you so many years?”

“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.”

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

“Name one hero who was happy.”

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them, if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

“What you must understand about me is that I'm a deeply unhappy person.”

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”

“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.”

“We know what we are, but not what we may be.”

“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”

“Well, it seems to me that the best relationships, the ones that last, are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. One day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been flicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is... suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with.”

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”

“The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.”

“There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”

“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”

“Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”

“Live to the point of tears.”

“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.”

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”

“Enjoy it. Because it's happening.”

“It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”

“Life is for the living.”