There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal. - Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

If people make fun of you, that probably means you're doing something right. - Evanescence

Are you an idiot, or an idiot?' Gargarin hissed.'The first one. I really resent being called the second. - Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles

See? This is why I'm not religious. I couldn't possibly keep my mouth shut long enough to get along with everyone else. - Jim Butcher, White Night

Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them - Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore. - Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves. - Horace Mann

You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. - Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. - Christopher Pike, Black Blood

Realizing the seriously ruthless, venomous habits and agendas of evil always instills a more fierce passion and longing for a closer God. Men, out of pride, may claim their own authorities over what constitutes good and evil; they may self-proclaim a keen knowledge of subjective morality through religion or science. But that is only if they are acknowledging the work of evil as a cartoon-like, petty little rain cloud in the sky that merely wants to dampen one's spirits. On the contrary, a man could be without a doubt lit with the strength, the peace, and the knowledge of the gods, his gods, but when or if the devils grow weary in unsuccessful attempts to torment him, they begin tormenting his loved ones, or, if not his loved ones, anyone who may attempt to grasp his philosophies. No matter how godly he may become, God is, in the end, his only hope and his only grace for the pressures built around him - it is left up to a higher authority and a more solid peace and a wider love to eclipse not just one's own evils but all evils for goodness to ultimately matter. If all men were gods, each being would dwell in a separate prison cell, hopeless, before finally imploding into nothingness. - Criss Jami, Killosophy

Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for - Oliver James

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with. - Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me. - Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that --I didn't let it-- and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. - Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

My reasons to liveWere my reasons to dieBut at least they were mineNow I've freedom unboundCut the laces of life - Emilie Autumn

The future doesn't belong to the light-hearted. It belongs to the brave. - Ronald Reagan

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold. - Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

I am a citizen of the world. - Diogenes of Sinope, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy - in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other. - Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

Men are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy has the right to say to himself, 'I am doing God's will on earth. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov