Isabel Allende

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

Write what should not be forgotten.

The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.

Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.

There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.

For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.

We only have what we give.

You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.

Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.

A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.

Words are not that important when you recognize intentions.

Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.

Eoin Colfer

Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.

It's like learning to ride a unicorn. You never forget.

I never tell anyone exactly how clever I am. They would be too scared.

If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose, then I'm crazy. That's the way history is written.

If you were me, then I'd be you, and if I were you, then I'd hide somewhere far away.

Trust me. I'm a genius.

No matter what dimension you're in, there's a big-headed male trying to take over the world.

Listen to me, goblin. You're stupid, let's accept that and move on.

Good. Illegal is always faster.

Butler could kill you a hundred different ways without use of his armoury. Though I'm sure one would be quite sufficient.

Tess Gerritsen

I know there’s evil in the world, and there always has been. But you don’t need to believe in Satan or demons to explain it. Human beings are perfectly capable of evil all by themselves.

Only the forgotten are truly dead.

The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.

The dead do not hurt you; only the living do.

Evil doesn't die. It never dies. It just takes on a new face, a new name. Just because we've been touched by it once, it doesn't mean we're immune to ever being hurt again. Lightning can strike twice.

Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.

Everything's a gamble, love most of all.

You don't have to die to go to hell.

The most intimate feeling people can share is neither love nor hate, but pain.

We are all descended from monsters.

That's what falling in love really amounted to, your brain on drugs. Adrenaline and dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Chemical insanity, celebrated by poets.

Matthew Tobin Anderson

There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.

We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.

We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.

There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”

At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.

We all flee in hope of finding some ground of security.

Michael Lewis

Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient," Said Palmer. " The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions--if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.”

He was ignorant, but a lot of people mistook ignorance for stupidity, and knowingness for intelligence.

Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.

The lesson of Buffett was: To succeed in a spectacular fashion you had to be spectacularly unusual.

James Frey

Sometimes skulls are thick. Sometimes hearts are vacant. Sometimes words don't work. 

Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don't think you can, hold on.

When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.

The wounds that never heal can only be mourned alone.

Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. 

If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my soul to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end.

Garth Nix

Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?

Touchstone watched, suddenly conscious that he probably only had five seconds left to be alone with Sabriel, to say something, to say anything. Perhaps the last five seconds they ever would have alone together.
I am not afraid, he said to himself. "I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind.

Maybe if I act well enough, I'll come to believe it myself.

Sometimes it is easier to see the light when you stand partly in the darkness.

Fear and realisation of ignorance, strong medicines against stupid pride.

et this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die.

Choosers will be beggars if the begging's not their choosing.

Who or what are you? Besides insufferably rude?

Jeanne DuPrau

The trouble with anger is, it gets hold of you. And then you aren't the master of yourself anymore. Anger is. And when anger is the boss, you get unintended consequences.

When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?' 'You wouldn't want to. That's what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.

There is so much darkness in Ember, Lina. It's not just outside, it's inside us, too. Everyone has some darkness inside. It's like a hungry creature. It wants and wants and wants with a terrible power. And the more you give it, the bigger and hungrier it gets.

he main thing to do is pay attention. Pay close attention to everything, notice what no one else notices. Then you'll know what no one else knows, and that's always useful.

What you need to learn, children, is the difference between right and wrong in every area of life. And once you learn the difference, you must always choose the right.

People find a way through just about anything.

A person who thought he knew everything simply didn’t understand how much there was to know.

eople didn't make life, so they can't destroy it. Even if we were to wipe out every bit of life in the world, we can't touch the place life comes from. Whatever made the plants and animals and people spring up in the first place will always be there, and life will spring up again.

Kate DiCamillo

Open your heart. Someone will come. Someone will come for you. But first you must open your heart.

There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.

There is nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.

Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light

You can't always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”

Once upon a time," he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.

Mark Haddon

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

I want my name to mean me.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.