Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.
Louisa May Alcott, Abbot's Ghost: A Christmas Story
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desire.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.
Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness
Patience is a conquering virtue.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.
attr. Helen Keller, from interviews on the vaudeville circuit
It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.
Bram Stoker, Dracula
There’s no one alive there, only ghosts knocking on my soul.
Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds
Yet as I consider my brief, romantic history—history brimful of glorious, challenging women—I remember that no one is ever lost to sea.
Rachel Vorona, The Art of Loving and Losing Female Friends
Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Maya Angelou, as quoted in USA Today (5 March 1988)
That best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.
William Wordsworth, "Line Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"
If it were a friend or partner instead of my mother, I’d be recognized as brave and good with boundaries. Is it because we share blood? Is blood the thing that gives us license to indefinitely cause hurt?
Shannon Fisher, I'm Estranged From My Mother, But I'm OK With It
I will drink life to the lees.
Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses"
Curiosity does have a tendency to get you killed. The truly fearless don’t last long, and the birds who go out in search of new knowledge are inevitably the first ones to get plucked.
Yasmin Nair, The Dangerous Academic is an Extinct Species
Anger gets shit done.
Mr. Nancy, American Gods 1x08, "Come to Jesus"
Children’s games are stronger than you remember once you’ve grown up and left them behind. They’re always fair, and never kind.
Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night
So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.
Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth