“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. ”
― Norwegian Wood

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Norwegian Wood

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”
― Norwegian Wood

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”
― The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Spend your money on the things money can buy. Spend your time on the things money can’t buy.”
― The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Donna Tart
_________
Born : December 23, 1963
_________
American novelist especially noted for her debut novel, The Secret History (1992), and her third book, The Goldfinch (2013), winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Eleven years after the publication of The Little Friend, The Goldfinch appeared. The title refers to an exquisite 1654 painting—not much bigger than a standard sheet of paper—by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius (1622–54) that serves as the plot device that drives the story. Many readers found the work to be a significant addition to the literature of trauma and memory and a highly engaging meditation on the power of art. In 2014 the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― The Secret History

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― The Goldfinch

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― The Secret History

“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
― The Goldfinch

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”
― The Goldfinch

“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”
― The Goldfinch

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― The Secret History

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― The Secret History

“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
― The Secret History

“We are so customed to disguise ourselves to others that, in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.”
― The Goldfinch

“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great.”
― The Secret History

Leo Tolstoy (Russian writer)
___________
Born : September 9, 1828
Died : November 20, 1910
___________
Tolstoy also spelled Tolstoi, Russian in full Lev Nikolayevich, Graf (count) Tolstoy, Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists.

Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written. War and Peace in particular seems virtually to define this form for many readers and critics. Among Tolstoy’s shorter works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is usually classed among the best examples of the novella. Especially during his last three decades Tolstoy also achieved world renown as a moral and religious teacher. His doctrine of nonresistance to evil had an important influence on Gandhi. Although Tolstoy’s religious ideas no longer command the respect they once did, interest in his life and personality has, if anything, increased over the years.