Beth Revis

I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn't have one.

Dreams are like that: they go in and out of memories and scenes, but they're never real. They're never real, and I hate them because they aren't.

Power isn’t control at all — power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.

This is the secret of the stars, I tell myself. In the end, we are alone. No matter how close you seem, no one else can touch you.

That's all you need to know about Godspeed," he says. "Although you should also know this. I am Eldest."
Maybe the secret of the stars has nothing to do with being alone. Good for you, I think. Congrats on being old.

It is like a piece of my soul had been lost, empty, and it is now filled with the light of a million stars.

Well, sometimes home is a person.

And in her smile I see something more beautiful than the stars.

The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another but they are so distant so very far apart that they cannot feel the warmth of each other even though they are made of burning.

Bill Watterson

Reality continues to ruin my life.

Sometimes when I'm talking, my words can't keep up with my thoughts. I wonder why we think faster than we speak. Probably so we can think twice.

It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.

You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants don't help.

I'm killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.

People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.

I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you're doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you're lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you're really lucky.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

You know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon...everything's different.

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.

Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world's problems?

You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!

Linus Pauling II

I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this: 'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error.

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Satisfaction of one's curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.

I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years. 

Science is the search for the truth--it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find the right solution, the just solution of international problems, and not an effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible. I believe in morality, in justice, in humanitarianism.

Angela Carter

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.

I desire therefore I exist.

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.

The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.

Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.

Italo Calvino

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Helen Fielding

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.

Can officially confirm that the way to a man's heart these days is not through beauty, food, sex, or alluringness of character, but merely the ability to seem not very interested in him.

I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts.

It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting "Cathy" and banging your head against a tree.

Tom has a theory that homosexuals and single women in their thirties have natural bonding: both being accustomed to disappointing their parents and being treated as freaks by society.

That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.

I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen.

It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals.

I'm no good at anything. Not men. Not social skills. Not work. Nothing.

Drew Barrymore

I think happiness is what makes you pretty. Period. Happy people are beautiful. They become like a mirror and they reflect that happiness.

Kissing - and I mean like, yummy, smacking kissing - is the most delicious, most beautiful and passionate thing that two people can do, bar none. Better than sex, hands down.

If you don't take risks, you'll have a wasted soul.

In the end, some of your greatest pains become your greatest strengths.

I'm not insecure. I've been through way too much f**king sh*t to be insecure. I've got huge balls. But I've been humbled. That makes you grateful for every day you have.

There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.

When I lay my head on the pillow at night I can say I was a decent person today. That's when I feel beautiful.

I never regret anything. Because every little detail of your life is what made you into who you are in the end.

You can never, never have too many books.

When things are perfect, that's when you need to worry most.

God made a very obvious choice when he made me voluptuous; why would I go against what he decided for me? My limbs work, so I'm not going to complain about the way my body is shaped.

Life is very interesting... in the end, some of your greatest pains, become your greatest strengths.

Daisies are like sunshine to the ground.

Betty Friedan

Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.

No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.

It is easier to live through someone else than to complete yourself. The freedom to lead and plan your own life is frightening if you have never faced it before. It is frightening when a woman finally realizes that there is no answer to the question 'who am I' except the voice inside herself

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.

You can have it all, just not all at the same time.

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination--tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.

he key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

Kim Harrison

That's why I want you there, he said. You're unpredictable, and that can be the

 difference between success and failure. Most people make decisions in anger, fear, love, or obligation. You make decisions to irritate people.

And then there are the rare ones who know love, who understand it. Who freely give of themselves, demanding only a return of that love, that trust.

Hey, ah, does anyone want a cookie or something? Oh yeah. A cookie. That would make everything better. Dunked in a shot of tequila , maybe? Or better yet, just the bottle? Yeah, that ought to do it.

. . . treat people with understanding when you can, and fake it when you can't, until you do understand.

Growing up is hard, love. Otherwise everyone would do it.

The mistakes don't matter. It's what you do when you mess up that does.

I'm only going to be here for a time, then leave you. His gaze met mine. "And I will cry when I go, because I could love you forever."

As the joke goes, you don’t have to be faster than the wolf chasing you, just faster than everyone else running away.

My mother isn't crazy. She simply has a harder time than most reconciling her reality with everyone else's reality.

Endings are not always bad. Most times they're just beginnings in disguise.

Cheryl Strayed

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

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.

Don't surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn't true anymore.

Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.

You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.