"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating."
-Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea


"But I don't have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want."
-Amy Tan, The Bonesetter’s Daughter


"Lost people are different. They will drive around in the same circle over and over rather than try a new path. Their fear of getting more lost paralyzes them into staying lost in the area that's become familiar. It supersedes their ability to chart a new course. They circle and backtrack and stay comfortably lost because it's less scary than seeing something different than what's presently in front of them."
-Jill A. Davis, Ask Again Later


"And books, they offer one hope - that a whole new universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved."
-Anne Rice, Blackwood Farm


"You are allowed to be alive. You are allowed to be somebody different. You are allowed to not say goodbye to anybody or explain a single thing to anyone, ever."
-Augusten Burroughs


"I'd found out that if you pushed people away hard enough, they tended to go."
-Morgan Matson, Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour


"A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. It’s happening."
-Ryan O’Connell


"Maybe. But think about it. We are like water, aren't we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too." And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.
-Wally Lamb, We Are Water


"There's no reason to speak. I have nothing to say."
-Julie Anne Peters, By The Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead


"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
-Ernest Hemingway


"The hardest thing to do when you go back underwater, is talk about what the sky was like."
-Iain Thomas


"In this big wide world, so full of people… Each and everyone of them thinking, Why am I all alone?"
-Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins to the Moon


"My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination."
-Sleep, Haruki Murakami


"Why can’t we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn’t work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos."
-Charlie Brown


"I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door."
-J.D. Salinger, A Boy in France


"Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too – a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep."
-Jeanette Winterson, from “Why be Happy When You Can be Normal"