"you can’t live in this world with such strong likes and dislikes."

— j.d. salinger, franny and zooey 

"what lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself."

— jeffrey eugenides, the virgin suicides 

"what a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person."

— john green, paper towns

"i have measured out my life in coffee spoons."

— t.s. eliot, “the love song of j. alfred prufrock” 

"every time i came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, i had this feeling that i’d never get to the other side of the street. i thought i’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again."

— j.d. salinger, the catcher in the rye

"the truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. the truth is you will be. and the secret it, this will hurt less and less each time until you can’t feel a thing."

— chuck palahniuk, survivor 

"all time is all time. it does not change. it does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. it simply is. take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as i’ve said before, bugs in amber."

— kurt vonnegut, slaughterhouse-five

"for a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. but they made no sound, and what i had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever."

— f. scott fitzgerald, the great gatsby

"in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone."

— ayn rand, anthem

"nothing is static. even the mona lisa is falling apart."

— -chuck palahniuk, fight club