John Burdett

Your fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of your fear of letting go.

Don't ask me when I first mastered the obvious.

You don't understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha. What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way.

I don't want enlightenment, I want him. Sorry Buddha, I loved him more than you.

Bangkok is one of the world's great cities, all of which own red-light districts that find their ways into the pages of novels from time to time. The sex industry in Thailand is smaller per capita because the Thais are less coy about it than many other people. Most visitors to the kingdom enjoy wonderful vacations without coming across any evidence of sleaze at all.

We do not look on death the way you do, farang. My closest colleagues grasp my arm and one or two embrace me. No one says sorry. Would you be sorry for a sunset?

The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.

I am moonlighting for the Buddha.

Susan Vreeland

You know, bicycling isn't just a matter of balance," I said. "it's a matter of faith. You can keep upright only by moving forward. You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground. I'm going to call that the Bicyclist's Philosophy of Life.

Everybody works . . . . That's what life is. Work and a little play and a lot of prayer.

If two people love the same thing, she reasoned, then they must love each other, at least a little, even if they never say it."

He and I had a bridge that no one else traveled that made us artistic lovers, passionate without a touch of the flesh. He made me thrive, and valuing that, I could do nothing that would endanger it.

A hard choice. Water or books. Hmm. One could always have wine instead.

Things that have been lost and then found are doubly precious, don't you think. People too.

In the end, it's only the moments that we have.

Work is love made plain, whether man’s work or woman’s work.

He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials--I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered--it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.

Douglas Preston

It's a very bad habit, but one I find hard to break.

The truth shall make you free, but first it will make you miserable.

We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.

What we have here is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

He found Pendergast's cool gaze on him, and he fidgeted. He'd forgotten about those eyes. They made you feel like you had just been stripped of your secrets.

You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion.

Once again, we shall have to operate not only outside the box, but outside the room containing the box.

The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid.

One can reach the gates of hell just as easily by short steps as by large.

Nicholas Evans

I guess that’s all forever is...Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.

Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts. About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater. 

The imporant things in life never happened by accident. But even with those things that were meant to be, sometimes you had to wait awhile and then maybe give them a little nudge.

She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn’t been able to give...at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him.

I am not gone but merely walk within you

It's a lot like nuts and bolts - if the rider's nuts, the horse bolts! 

No man may earn his heart's desire, lest first he brave the smoke and fire.

Look after each other. As a couple. When you have kids, you'll want to put them first. Don't. Marriage is like a plant. To keep it alive you've got to water it and feed it. If you don't, when the kids are gone, you'll look in the corner and it'll be dead.

Tana French

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack .

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them.

My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better--Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos--so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

Diana Gabaldon

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.

I can bear pain myself, he said softly, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.

Oh, aye, Sassenach. I am your master . . . and you're mine. Seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own.

For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary.

Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone,
I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One.
I give ye my Spirit, 'til our Life shall be Done.

You are mine, always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I willna let ye go.

There are things that I canna tell you, at least not yet. And I'll ask nothing of ye that ye canna give me. But what I would ask of ye---when you do tell me something, let it be the truth. And I'll promise ye the same. We have nothing now between us, save---respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies. Do ye agree?

Dan Simmons

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.

Want to talk about Shakespeare's sonnets?" asked Orphu of Io.
Are you shitting me?" The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
Yes," said Orphu. "I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.

Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil. 

To be a true poet is to become God.
I tried to explain this to my friends on Heaven's Gate. 'Piss, shit,' I said. 'Asshole motherfucker, goddamn shit goddamn. Cunt. Pee-pee cunt. Goddamn!'
They shook their heads and smiled, and walked away. Great poets are rarely understood in their own day.

Gregory David Roberts

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.

Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.

Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.

Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.

I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.

The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly, and with the eyes open.

If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke.

Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.

You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.

Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it's the other way around.

Geraldine Brooks

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. 

I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It's the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as "Massholes."

Steven Pressfield

A cavalryman's horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse must never be alowed to know this.

If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

This man has conquered the world! What have you done?"
The philosopher replied without an instant's hesitation, "I have conquered the need to conquer the world.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

If you're are paralyzed with fear it's a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.

A work-in-progress generates its own energy field. You, the artist or entrepreneur, are pouring love into the work; you are suffusing it with passion and intention and hope.