A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
- Tim O’Brien; The Things they Carried
There’s always going to be bad stuff out there. But here’s the amazing thing — light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can’t stick the dark into the light.
- Jodi Picoult; Change of Heart
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
- Thomas Hardy; Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Don’t compromise yourself - you’re all you have.
- John Grisham; The Rainmaker
Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.
- Chuck Klosterman; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
- Truman Capote; Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel
The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
- Malcolm Gladwell; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how it actually does work.
- Steven D. Levitt; Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.
- Sara Gruen; Ape House
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean jut that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
- Arthur Golden; Memoirs of a Geisha
Books have an incredible power of taking us away from our current struggles.