Frederick Buechner

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Go where your best prayers take you.

Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. 

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Kelly Creagh

The more this guy talked, the more he sounded like a fortune cookie.

You're really a blond," she said, her tone just short of accusatory.
"And if you tell anyone, I will come to you in the night and smote your everlasting soul.

Just because I wear black and keep a private journal, that doesn't mean I'm going to blow up the school. Or terrorize mindless cheerleaders, for that matter.

You're a dream. Like everything else.

When there is no way, you must make a way.

Just because I live in the sunlight, enjoy being blond, and wear a cheerleading uniform, that doesn't mean I'm stupid. I'm so sick of that.

Please welcome Professor Varen Nethers, famous depressed dead poets historian and author of the bestselling books Unlocking your Poe-tential: A Writer's Guide, and Mo Poe Fo Yo: When You Just Can't Get Enough.

Dan Millman

The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.

There are no ordinary moments.

Life has three rules: Paradox, Humor, and Change.
- Paradox: Life is a mystery; don't waste your time trying to figure it out.
- Humor: Keep a sense of humor, especially about yourself. It is a strength beyond all measure
- Change: Know that nothing ever stays the same.

If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever.

A warrior does not give up what he loves, he finds the love in what he does.

Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.

Everything you'll ever need to know is within you; the secrets of the universe are imprinted on the cells of your body.

You can live a whole life time never being awake.

Michael Chabon

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.

In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.

The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness.

Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn't prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn't have to beg him for financial support.

However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.

I would like to be judged on the validity of my arguments, not as a victim.

Islam was like a mental cage. At first, when you open the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.

Reality is not easy, but all this make-believe doesn't make it easier.

Multiculturalism should not mean that we tolerate another culture’s intolerance. If we do in fact support diversity, women’s rights, and gay rights, then we cannot in good conscience give Islam a free pass on the grounds of multicultural sensitivity.

Sara Shepard

Never trust a pretty girl with an ugly secret.

I'm still here, bitches. And I know everything.

The sweetest smiles hold the darkest secrets. . .

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

Never under estimate a pretty little liar.

Always sleep with one eye open. Never take anything for granted. Your best friends might just be your enemies.

No one believes a liar. Even when she's telling the truth.

Strangers see you the way you want them to see you. You can't fool friends…that's what makes them friends. . .

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the naughtiest of them all?

You know what they say about hope. It breeds eternal misery!

Before you enbark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

The best secrets are the most twisted.

Richard Castle

There are two kinds of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill people: psychopaths and mystery writers.

As a writer, I can think of no greater terror than confronting a blank page, except perhaps the terror of being shot at.

I really am ruggedly handsome, aren't I

Rejection isn't failure. Failure is giving up. Everybody gets rejected. It's how you handle it that determines where you'll end up.

Because if you don't even believe in the possibility of magic you will never ever find it.

People change when you're not looking.

John Lennon said life was what happened while you made other plans. So was death.

Anything is possible.
You really believe that?
It's what the great love stories are about, right Beating the odds.

Trenton Lee Stewart

You must remember, family is often born of blood, but it doesn't depend on blood. Nor is it exclusive of friendship. Family members can be your best friends, you know. And best friends, whether or not they are related to you, can be your family.

May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home.

Rules and school are tools for fools! I don't give two mules for rules.

Oh, here’s a clever one. Do you remember this question from the first test? It reads, ‘What’s wrong with this statement?’ And do you know what Constance wrote in reply? She wrote, ‘What’s wrong with you?

Is this what family is like: the feeling that everyone’s connected, that with one piece missing, the whole thing’s broken?

Children are capable of such open rudeness.

One problem with being a leader, is that even among your friends you are alone, for it is you -- and you alone -- to whom the others look for final guidance.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Words were different when they lived inside of you.

I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.

To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.

Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.

We all fight our own private wars.

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.

And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness.
Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that.

Rebecca McNutt

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I’m not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that’s been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that’s what growing up is… it’s a fading photograph.

You don't have to be invisible to disappear.

Friends are like the stars that glow in the sky... you don't always see them, but you know they're always there overhead, and even when it's cloudy, snowy or stormy, even when the power goes out and you're trapped in darkness, they'll always find a way to shine through to you.

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.

People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.

Maybe you just can’t have life without death… maybe death is supposed to teach us how to live.