Lemony Snicket

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

I suppose I'll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies.

Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.

The sad truth is the truth is sad.

It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.

There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.

I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it.

Neil Gaiman II

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

You're always you, and that don't change, and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.

W. Somerset Maugham II

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. Impropriety is the soul of wit.

If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers.

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

It’s a very funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognize the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life -- their pleasure.

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

C. JoyBell C.

You can talk with someone for years, everyday, and still, it won't mean as much as what you can have when you sit in front of someone, not saying a word, yet you feel that person with your heart, you feel like you have known the person for forever.... connections are made with the heart, not the tongue.

Don't be afraid of your fears. They're not there to scare you. They're there to let you know that something is worth it.

The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.

The unhappiest people in this world, are those who care the most about what other people think.

You only need one man to love you. But him to love you free like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides. Only one man and all of this.

I can't decide whether I'm a good girl wrapped up in a bad girl, or if I'm a bad girl wrapped up in a good girl. And that's how I know I'm a woman!

Don't think about making life better for other people who don't even deserve you, rather, focus on making your life the best, for yourself and those who love you.

You will manage to keep a woman in love with you, only for as long as you can keep her in love with the person she becomes when she is with you.

When you look for a man- what you want to look for is a man with the heart of a poor boy and the mind of a conqueror.

Oscar Wilde II

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

Ayn Rand II

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.

Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness.

Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! 

I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.

If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"
I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"
To shrug.

My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.

If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

Katharine Hepburn

If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun.

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change.

Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I've just done what I damn well wanted to, and I've made enough money to support myself, and ain't afraid of being alone.

If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior.

The thing about life is that you must survive. Life is going to be difficult, and dreadful things will happen. What you do is move along, get on with it, and be tough. Not in the sense of being mean to others, but being tough with yourself and making a deadly effort not to be defeated

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.

I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for people

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Scott Westerfeld

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.

Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.

I can’t imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.

What happens when perfection isn't good enough?

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future... all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty.

Sophie Kinsella

Sometimes you don't need a goal in life, you don't need to know the big picture. You just need to know what you're going to do next!

I love new clothes. If everyone could just wear new clothes everyday, I reckon depression wouldn’t exist anymore.

Life would be a lot easier if conversations were rewindable and erasable, like videos. Or if you could instruct people to disregard what you just said, like in a courtroom.

In the end, you have to choose whether or not to trust someone.

Darling, when things go wrong in life, you lift your chin, put on a ravishing smile, mix yourself a little cocktail. . .

It's like I'm thirteen again and he's my crush. All I'm aware of in this entire roomful of people is him. Where he is, what he's doing, who he's talking to.

Relationships are all about trust and equality. If one person shares, then the other person should share, too.

My life has changed, and I'm changing with it.

Never give up on something you really want. However impossible things seem, there's always a way.

No human on God's earth is a nobody.

It’s the way he had a cup of tea waiting for me when I woke up. It’s the way he turned on his laptop especially for me to look up all my Internet horoscopes and helped me choose the best one. He knows all the crappy, embarrassing bits about me that I normally try to hide from any man for as long as possible… and he loves me anyway.

Dorothy Allison

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

Behind the story I tell is the one I don't.
Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different...I claimed myself and remade my life. Only when I knew I belonged to myself completely did I become capable of giving myself to another, of finding joy in desire, pleasure in our love, power in this body no one else owns.