“You walked, by chance, into a life I wasn't proud of, and from that day something started to change. I have breathed better, I have hated less, I have freely admired what was meant to be.

Before you, without you, I adored nothing.

With you, I have accepted more things, I have learned to live. That's probably why I've always mixed my love with so much gratitude.”

– Albert Camus, in a letter to Maria Casarés

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“Yes, life is full, there is life even underground,” he began again. “You wouldn’t believe, Alexey, how I want to live now, what a thirst for existence and consciousness has sprung up in me within these peeling walls… And what is suffering? I am not afraid of it, even if it were beyond reckoning. I am not afraid of it now. I was afraid of it before… And I seem to have such strength in me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands of agonies — I exist. I’m tormented on the rack — but I exist! Though I sit alone on a pillar — I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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“There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish?
Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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“I have led a toothless life, he thought. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on - and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

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“‘I’ve always wanted to ask,’ Myshkin said quietly, ‘why do people laugh at goodness? I’ve seen it—someone does a kind thing, and they’re mocked, called a fool. I’ve felt it myself, that sting, but I can’t stop believing in it. Yesterday, I gave a beggar my last coin, and a man sneered at me. Why does it hurt so much to be good?’ His voice trembled, his pale face glowing with a strange earnestness. Rogozhin shrugged. ‘Because the world’s rotten, and you’re too soft for it.’ Myshkin smiled faintly. ‘Maybe. But I’d rather be broken than cruel.’”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

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“It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”

– Terry Pratchett, Jingo

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“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

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“Time interval is a strange and contradictory matter in the mind. It would be reasonable to suppose that a routine time or an eventless time would seem interminable. It should be so, but it is not. It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy — that's the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”

– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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“If someone here told me to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank. On the last page I should write, “I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.” And, as far as everything else is concerned, I say no. I say no with all my strength.”

– Albert Camus

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“We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.”

– J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

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“I longed to fling myself into debauchery, to drown my misery in it, but I couldn’t even manage that—I was too cowardly, too fastidious. Instead, I’d sit in my corner, gnawing at myself, nursing my spite. I’d dream of grand revenges, of crushing my enemies with my brilliance, but in reality I’d just sulk and do nothing. I’d go to some filthy tavern, drink cheap vodka, and pick fights with strangers, only to slink away humiliated. Oh, if you only knew how I hated myself in those moments! But I couldn’t stop—I needed that shame, that sting, to feel alive.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

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“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

– Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

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“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.”

– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

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“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

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"I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason."

- Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

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“For years I’ve wanted to live according to everyone else’s morals. I’ve forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth–after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.”

– Albert Camus

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"There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself."

– Virginia Woolf

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How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

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20 books — 20 genres

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."

– Carl Sagan's prediction in 1995.

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