Anouilh, Jean:

"Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God."

Buck, Joan Juliet

Chandler, Raymond

Christie, Agatha:

"An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her."

de Quincey, Thomas:

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
(Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo:

Life is our dictionary.
(The American Scholar)

Your goodness must have an edge to it, -- else it is none.
(Self-Reliance)

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest things we know.
(Friendship)

Greene, Graham:

How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.
(The End of the Affair)

Haggard, H. Rider:

Listen! what is life? It is a feather; it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if the seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it will. It is well to try and journey one's road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can die a little sooner. I will go with thee across the desert and over the mountains, unless perchance I fall to the ground on the way, my father.
(King Solomon's Mines)

Huxley, Aldous:

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. "The first thing," I said, "is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write."
(Music at Night)

Johnson, Samuel:

"One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts."

Kierkegaard, Soren:

"Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth."

Lawrence, T.E.:

"I imagine leaves must feel like this after they have fallen from their tree and until they die."

Masefield, John:

When I am buried,
all my thoughts and acts
Will be reduced to
lists of dates and facts
(Biography)

Parker, Dorothy:

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
(Enough Rope)

Pynchon, Thomas:

(When asked about the complexity of V.) "Why should things be easy to understand?"

Reade, Charles:

"To feel that life is ended; to wish existence, too, had ceased; and so to sit down, an aching hollow, and take a part and sham an interest in twaddle to please others; such are woman's feats."

Rhys, Jean:

But he was without bourgeois prejudices, or he imagined that he was, and he had all his life acted on impulse, though always in a careful and businesslike manner.
(Quartet)

It was astonishing how significant, coherent and understandable it all became after a glass of wine on an empty stomach.
(Quartet)

I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds -- with God's help I catch some.
(Wide Sargasso Sea)

Thoreau, Henry:

"We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my own townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects."

Turgenev, Ivan:

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.
(Fathers and Sons)

Weil, Simone:

Indeed, for other people, in a sense I do not exist. I am the color of dead leaves, like certain unnoticed insects.
(Waiting for God)

The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it has ever contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love.
(Waiting for God)

Our love should stretch as widely across all space, and should be as equally distributed in every portion of it, as is the very light of the sun. Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate bestowal of light. Our intelligence too should have the same complete impartiality.
(Waiting for God)

Wilde, Oscar:

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like everyone else.
(The Importance of Being Ernest)

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