“The town was paper, but the memories were not.”

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.”

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.”

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

“Stupid people are dangerous.”

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”

“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”

“Angry people are not always wise.”

“You do not have to be good.”

“Books may well be the only true magic.”

“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

“The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he had learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.”

“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

“We're all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you've been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there's no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn't until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems, the ones that make you truly who you are, that we're ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you're looking for. You're looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: it's got to be the right wrong person, someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, 'This is the problem I want to have.'”

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”

“It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it's so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn't come back. You're left so alone that you can't explain. Damn, there's nothing like that, is there? I've been there and you have too. You're nodding your head.”

“The first ten lies they tell you in high school.”

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about their own.”

“I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That’s why I’m trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.”

“Resist much, obey little.”

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.”

“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”

“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“But I don't want to go among mad people, Alice remarked.”

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”

“I am very interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.”

“Life is too short to waste your time on people who don't respect, appreciate, and value you.”

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

“The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; that is, the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally, and often far more, worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”