Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 - May 28, 2014)

I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life. I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as making a 'life.' I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back. I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one. I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I've learned that I still have a lot to learn. I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Vincent van Gogh

For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of stars makes me dream.

Man Walks Into a Room

He wouldn’t simply allow things to happen to him anymore.  He was alive, and for the first time since he’d woken out of the slumber of his past life, he felt it.  It was not that he was painfully aware of each moment, as he had been upon waking from the operation.  It seemed to him now that it was probably only the dying who saw the world with such precise and formal clarity as that, knowing it was already lost to them.  No, this was something different, as if at some point in the hazy bacchanal of the night he had been handed back his life.  A moment of reprieve, his heart bursting with a high-spirited hope, hammering it’s percussion in his chest.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men.

William Hazlitt

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

I was beginning to enjoy the sun again, the mountains, even life’s problems, I was beginning to accept that the meaninglessness of life was no one’s fault but mine. I wanted to…feel hatred and love, despair and tedium, all those simple, foolish things that make up everyday life, but which give pleasure to your existence. If one day I could get out of here, I would allow myself to be mad, because everyone is, indeed, the maddest are the ones who don’t know they’re mad, but keep repeating what others tell them to.

Sylvia Plath's Journals

Writing makes me a small God: I re-create the flux and smash of the world through the small ordered word patterns I make. I have powerful physical, intellectual and emotional forces which must have outlets, creative, or they turn to destruction and waste.

George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species. 

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

All the aching muscles and the hunger in my belly were bad enough, and the surroundant dark rocks, the fact that there is nothing there to soothe you with kisses and soft words, but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man—‘twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in front of all our phantom unlaundered eyes, friends.

Like Life by Lorrie Moore

She knew there were only small joys in life - the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through - and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.  You could put the pressure aside, like a child’s game, its box ripped to flaps at the corners.  You could stick it in some old closet and forget about it.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Then he suddenly saw clearly that he was leading a strange life, that he was doing many things that were only a game, that he was quite cheerful and sometimes experienced pleasure, but that real life was flowing past him and did not touch him. Like a player who plays with his ball, he played with business, with the people around him, watched them, derived amusement from them; but with his heart, with his real nature, he was not there.

The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer by Eugenio Montejo

The earth turned to bring us closer,


it spun on itself and within us, 
and

finally joined us together in this dream


as written in the Symposium.
 Nights

passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
 time

passed in minutes and millennia.
 An ox

cart that was on its way to Nineveh
 arrived

in Nebraska.
 A rooster was singing some

distance from the world, 
in one of the

thousand pre–lives of our fathers.
 The

earth was spinning with its music
 carrying

us on board;
 it didn't stop turning a single

moment 
as if so much love, so much that's

miraculous 
was only an adagio written long

ago 
in the Symposium’s score.

Silas Marner by George Eliot

It’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest—one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do after all—the big things come and go with no striving or our’n—they do, that they do.

The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten

Humor is designed to deliver joy to others, but there is something about it that permits—even demands—an emotional distance from your subject. Part of it is that humor often requires a bloodless hostility; laughs usually come at the expense of something or someone. And part of it involves the nature of humor itself—it exists, on the deepest level, as a perverse denial of pain and fear. No one has ever explained this more succinctly or ingeniously than Dave Barry did in a tiny essay he wrote for a newspaper magazine I edited in the 1980s. I had asked him to create a definition of “sense of humor.” He took three days. This is what he wrote: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which you realize that you are trapped in a world almost entirely devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel at this knowledge.”

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

That wasn’t it.  Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven.  Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death:  death will overtake us before heaven.  The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.  But who wants to die?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excrutiating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity.

Farewell Ungrateful Traitor by John Dryden

Farewell, ungrateful traitor! 


Farewell, my perjur'd swain! 


Let never injur'd woman 


Believe a man again. 


The pleasure of possessing 


Surpasses all expressing, 


But 'tis too short a blessing, 


And love too long a pain.

'Tis easy to deceive us 


In pity of your pain, 


But when we love, you leave us 


To rail at you in vain. 


Before we have descried it, 


There is no joy beside it, 


But she that once has tried it 


Will never love again.

The passion you pretended 


Was only to obtain, 


But once the charm is ended, 


The charmer you disdain. 


Your love by ours we measure 


Till we have lost our treasure, 


But dying is a pleasure 


When living is a pain.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced at spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however—if I may use such an overworked word--miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds. 

The Plague by Albert Camus

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.