“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“Words without experience are meaningless.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.
Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss)

I know you aren't perfect. But it's a person's imperfections that make them perfect for someone else.
Stephanie Perkins, Lola and the Boy Next Door

I wish friends held hands more often, like the children I see on the streets sometimes. I'm not sure why we have to grow up and get embarrassed about it.
Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

Why is it that the right people never wind up together? Why are people so afraid to leave a relationship, even if they know it's a bad one?
Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss

Letting go doesn't mean that you don't care about someone anymore. It's just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.
Deborah Reber, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
John Green, Looking for Alaska

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

“I told you. You don't love someone because of their looks or their clothes or their car. You love them because they sing a song only your heart can understand.”
― L.J. Smith

“Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart