“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Besides, nowadays, almost all capable people are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

Twenty little leopards laughed at two lofty lions.

- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.

- Batman Begins

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities – I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not – that one endures.”

- Nietzsche

“Question everything. Your love, your religion, your passion. If you don't have questions, you'll never find answers.”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“Sometimes in life, we need a few bad days in order to keep the good ones in perspective.”
― Colleen Hoover, Maybe Someday

“So you keep your ocean, I'll take the Lake.”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“Imperfections define perfection”
― Colleen Hoover, Slammed

“He pulls back to look down at me and when he sees my tears, he brings his hands up to my cheeks. “In the future... if by some miracle you ever find yourself in the position to fall in love again... fall in love with me.”
― Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us

“When life gives you lemons, make sure you know whose eyes you need to squeeze them in.”
― Colleen Hoover, Ugly Love

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

Watch "Learning Languages Ruined My Life" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/ZZ_4gzoDDAE

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.

Sally Rooney, Normal People

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything

Sally Rooney, Normal People