Noah Hawley

It's hard to be sad when you're being useful.

Everyone has their own path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we'll go and the people we'll meet would be pointless.

Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then it's over.

There are things in this world that no human being should be able to endure. We should die of heartbreak, but we do not. Instead, we are forced to survive, to bear witness.

In the absence of facts.... we tell ourselves stories.

Liane Moriarty

They say it's good to let your grudges go, but I don't know, I'm quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.

Falling in love was easy.anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.

Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It's light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you've hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you've seen the worst and the best-- well, that sort of love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have and maybe should have taken. It's probably just as well. Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. Just ask Pandora.

All conflict can be traced back to someone’s feelings getting hurt, don’t you think.

Kate Quinn

I love you. I love the way you rub the scar on the back of your hand when you're nervous. I love the way you make a sword into a living part of your body. I love the way you burn your eyes into me, as if you're seeing me fresh every time. I love the black streak in you that wants to kill the world, and the soft streak that is sorry afterward. I love the way you laugh, as if you're surprised that you can laugh at all. I love the way you kiss my breath away.

Have you ever been - well, i mean, have you ever - really wanted someone ? Wanted them like water in the desert - even when you knew all their faults, every single one - and it didnt matter?

What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?

Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.

Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. “What?” “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.

Poetry is like passion--it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.

Courage is defined by how we meet unfortunat circumstances - inevitable or not.

Pam Jenoff

Why are we so hard on one another? I wonder. Hadn’t the world already given us challenges enough?

Create a story of which you will be proud.

We cannot change who we are. Sooner or later we will all have to face ourselves.

The truth is sometimes the very opposite from what you expect it to be.

I'm so sorry. I love you. I never could have hurt you.

Never assume that you know the mind of another.

Sometimes our forever life does not last as long as we think.

But the truth was when it came to grief, each person was an island, alone.

Though no one speaks of it, I sometimes wonder if we are marching toward extinction with each performance, too busy dancing and flying through the air to see it.

Stephen Fry

Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.

If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.

You are who you are when nobody's watching.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy.

The short answer to that is 'no.' The long answer is 'fuck no.'

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Brian Kilmeade

Their humility stopped them from seeking fame or fortune because their love of country sparked their exploits.

This is the story of how a new nation, saddled with war debt and desperate to establish credibility, was challenged by four Muslim powers. Our merchant ships were captured and the crews enslaved. Despite its youth, America would do what established western powers chose not to do: stand up to intimidation and lawlessness.

The Barbary states were already at war with America, and they seemed to understand only one kind of diplomacy—the kind that was accompanied by a cannon.

Tired of Americans being captured and held for ransom, our third president decided to take on the Barbary powers in a war that is barely remembered today but is one that, in many ways, we are still fighting.

Paula Hawkins

Hollowness: that I understand. I'm starting to believe that there isn't anything you can do to fix it. That's what I've taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gap.

I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.

There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home.

I have lost control over everything, even the places in my head.

The holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mould yourself through the gaps.

Life is not a paragraph, and death is no parenthesis.

There’s nothing so painful, so corrosive, as suspicion.

When did you become so weak?” I don’t know. I don’t know where that strength went, I don’t remember losing it. I think that over time it got chipped away, bit by bit, by life, by the living of it.

Sally Rooney

It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.

No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves

She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.

Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.

R. O. Kwon

Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.

I ate pain. I swilled tears. If I could take enough in, I'd have no space left to fit my own.

People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn't forget was the joy I'd known, loving Him.

I believe that we, in the attempt to live, invented Him. But if I could, I'd ask Him to give you everything.

It had rained his first day out of the gulag, the lines slanting like marionette strings.

Light spilled through closed eyelids, and I was turning into gold.

Rebecca Makkai 

I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved. They were college professors and actors and scientists and poets. They got to college and sat on dorm floors drinking coffee, amazed they'd finally found their soul mates. They always dressed a little out of season. Their names were enshrined on the pink cards in the pockets of all the forgotten hardbacks in every library basement in America. If the librarians were lazy enough or nostalgic enough or smart enough, those names would stay there forever.

It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary.

And was friendship that different in the end from love? You took the possibility of sex out of it, and it was all about the moment anyway. Being here, right now, in someone’s life. Making room for someone in yours.

And second, everyone is so weird, but they're all completely accepted. It's like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy's made of tin, and you're a talking chicken, but what the hell, let's do a road trip.