“When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty.”
― Stevie Nicks

“Everything tells me you care for me. And yet never a sign from you.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“The views expressed by Me are in no way endorsed by CBS any of its allied companies or in fact Me.”
― Craig Ferguson

“It's the map of my childhood, my sadness, my Eden, my hell and home.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“He said I didn't want to tell you
to wait for me (But wait for me)”
― Emily Skaja, Brute: Poems

“It was beautiful to be heartbroken, it was as pleasurable as a thing could be. But pointless.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?”
― John Keats

“To violate beauty
is the essence of sexual desire.
To procreate is the essence of decay.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“and what is not there
is always more than there.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“For the first time, Ted imagined fucking Anna the way he (almost) fucked Rachel: cruelly, without concern for her comfort, fully acknowledging that as much as he loved her, he hated her, too.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable ordeal labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“One morning, one day, perhaps soon, she would come to him and find him gone; and she knew how much she did not want to see him die, and yet how much she also wished that he might die holding her hand. These thoughts induced tears, which he must not see; and she tried not to think too much about the terrible mystery which was to be enacted . . .”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“Yes, I am free, she said to herself, but it's not like ordinary freedom, it's being in hell, a brilliant lucid hell.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“When one is very close to Truth itself, truthfulness vanishes.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“In a way it does not matter where I am. In another way where I am is fated.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“He felt indestructible because destroyed.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“But also: nightmares. The most delicious nightmares, the kind that one has only after the wall between the mundane and the magical is breached directly before one's eyes; nightmares that make you smile as you shiver in your sleep.”
― Dexter Palmer, Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

“It was nothing, but it was somehow everything—it was that something for each of them had happened.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Reading bad books is worse than reading nothing at all.”
― Andrew Pudewa

“That to want to succeed is to fail”
― Laura Kasischke, Space, in Chains

“That was how I responded to beauty, in both women and men: drawn to it at first, and then recoiling. Ruled by my own shallow impulses, then angry at the trick.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“There's a little edge of pain here and we walk along it.
Don't cry, don't kiss me either, and also don't stop.”
― Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

“now you are here
and never here”
― Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

“All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.”
― Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy

“How I hated her and how drawn I was to her at that moment!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

“Without the destruction of the battle there will be no calm of the peace, for such a perplexing dichotomy illustrates the contradictory nature of our humanity.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Yes and no. Specifically no.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity

“If you consider something to be the truth, and if you are attached to that, you are caught. Even when the truth itself comes and knocks at your door, you will not open it. The practice of releasing your knowledge is very important in Buddhism. Knowledge is the first obstacle of the mind that a meditator should be able to remove. We should not to be too sure of anything.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh