“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

— Ernest Hemingway
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
– Rilke

“It’s how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.”  – Camille Honeycutt to her daughter, Cecelia (CeeCee) from Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.” – Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, like being banished into forests far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” -Franz Kafka

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges (Argentinian poet and essayist, 1899-1986