The Stranger by Albert Camus

So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.  Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her.  And I felt ready to live it all again too.  As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.  Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.  For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

It has always seemed strange to me.  The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness and honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system.  And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.  And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

The Diary of Anne Frank

I don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists.  Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago!  There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill.  And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again!

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Is it not true, that slowly and through many deviations I changed from a man into a child?  From a thinker into an ordinary person?  And yet this path has been good and the bird in my breast has not died.  But what a path it has been!  I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew.  But it was right that it should be so; my eyes and heart acclaim it.  I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again, to sleep deeply again and to awaken refreshed again…I had to sin in order to live again.  Whither will my path yet lead me?  This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.

Letters to A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.

James Dean

In a certain sense I am fatalistic.  I don’t exactly know how to explain it, but I have a hunch there are some things in life that we just can’t avoid.  They’ll happen to us probably because we’re built that way - we simply attract our own fate…make our own destiny…I think I’m like the Aztecs in that respect too.  With their sense of doom, they tried to get the most out of life while life was good.  And I go along with them on that philosophy.  I don’t mean that ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die’ idea, but something a lot deeper and more valuable.  I want to live as intensely as I can.  Be as useful and helpful to others as possible, for one thing.  But live for myself as well.  I want to feel things and experiences right down to their roots…enjoy the good in life, while it is good.

Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger

You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.  You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know.  Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now.  Happily some of them kept records of their troubles.  You’ll learn from them - if you want to.  Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you.  It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement.  And it isn’t education.  It’s history.  It’s poetry.

The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed.  He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people.  This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind.  Life is so unreal.  I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.

Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss

You’re a kid, it’s summer, you blink your eyes and years - years - have passed.  And you realize that you’ve become someone else, but that your heart is still caught in that lost kid.  That what you’re left with beating in your chest is a diminished thing, a shadow of what it was when you were a boy and running under the night sky you felt it was filled to bursting.