“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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