Graham Greene

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

It was as though I'd learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful the became, even if they conquered the world, could take that, or change one single itch, taunt, laugh, cry, scar, ache, rage or pain of it. They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

            Sabina felt emptiness all around her.  What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?

            Naturally she had not realized it until now.  How could she have?  The goals we pursue are always veiled.  A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about.  The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is.  The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. when he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were saying, and more and more of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, with only intuition. and no one could accuse him of not being prolific in his chosen métier. Daily, he turned out whole epics of silence. In the beginning it had been difficult. imagine the burden of keeping silent when your child asks you whether God exists, or the woman you love asks you if you love her back. At first he longed for the use of just two words: yes and no. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence. Even after they arrested him and burned all his manuscripts, which were all blank pages, he refused to speak. Not even a groan when they gave him a blow to the head, a boot tip in the groin. Only at the last possible moment, as he faced the firing squad, did the writer suddenly sense the possibility of error. As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: there's no match for the silence of God.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan

We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can't convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, correspond to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last...
If we are to understand another's belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything? There is a worldwide closed-mindedness that imperils the species. It was always with us, but the risks weren't as grave, because weapons of mass destruction were not then available. 

Chronicles by Bob Dylan

Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it - like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come” - but you don’t know it in a purposeful way.  Little things foreshadow what’s coming, but you may not recognize them.  But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it - you’re set free.  You don’t need to ask questions and you already know the score.  It seems like when that happens, it happens fast, like magic, but it’s really not like that.  It isn’t like some dull boom goes off and the moment has arrived - your eyes don’t spring open and suddenly you’re very quick and sure about something.  It’s more deliberate.  It’s more like you’ve been working in the light of day and then you see one day that it’s getting dark early, that it doesn’t matter where you are - it won’t do any good.  It’s a reflective thing.  Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door - something jerks it open and you’re shoved in and your head has to go into a different place.  Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it. 

Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Accustomed to the peaceful, she turned in reaction to the picturesque.  She loved the sea only for its storms, green foliage only when it was scattered amid ruins.  It was necessary for her to derive a sort of personal profit from things, she rejected as useless whatever did not minister to her heart’s immediate fulfillment - being of a sentimental rather than artistic temperament, in search of emotions, not of scenery.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The same thing happened over and over:

            I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

            That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married.  The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from.  I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

All of a sudden there was a human being, a living human being, to shatter the death that had come down over me like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me, a good and beautiful and warm hand. All of a sudden there were things that concerned me again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen asleep in the cold and nearly frozen breathed once more, and sleepily spread its weak tiny wings.

Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

But I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met, who could be anywhere.  By saints I meant people who behaved decently in a strikingly indecent society. 

Letters to A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

What is necessary, after all, is only this:  solitude, vast inner solitude.  To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.  To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.