Never Too Late

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

- George Eliot

Anything but ordinary

Is it enough?
Is it enough to die?
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be anything but ordinary please
I'd rather be anything but ordinary please.

- Avril Lavigne

Good and Bad

The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.

- The Doctor

Doubt

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

- Voltaire

Lot's Wife

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse V

The Snow Man

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

- Wallace Stevens

Vanity Fair

Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? — Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.

- Thackerey

I love to doubt

I love to doubt as well as know.

- Dante Alighieri

Famous Last Words

I don't want to go. I could do so much more! So much more! But this is what I get, my reward. And it's not fair!

The White Album

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

— Joan Didion

Things

Things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence...I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace.

- Virginia Woolf

Home

Home is a holy thing—nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals … Here seems indeed to be a bit of Eden which not the sin of any can utterly destroy.

- Emily Dickinson

Desperate Hope

I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.

- W. S. Merwin

The Death of a Beekeeper

Although it is the second week in May, it's snowing today in all of Vastmanland. The ambulance is coming to get me at four o'clock. I hope the streets will not be too slippery.

One can always hope that there won't be an accident. One can still hope.

- Lars Gustafsson

Middlemarch

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

- George Eliot, Middlemarch

Inventions

Anything invented before your 15th birthday is the order of nature: that's how it should be. Any invention made between your 15th and 35th birthday Is new and exciting, and you might get a career there. Anything invented after that day is against nature and should be prohibited.

- Douglas Adams

The Ghost in the Shell

[From xkcd]

So little

So little of what could happen does happen.

— Salvador Dalí

A Backward Glance

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

- Edith Wharton,  A Backward Glance

I have come to believe...

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

- Umberto Eco

There is always a sheet of paper

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out.

- H. L. Mencken

Slouching hopefully….

Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield….
…forever.

- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

- Raymond Carver

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.

- Charles Bukowski, Post Office

Never say goodbye

The Graveyard Book

But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.

- Neil Gaiman

Speak Memory

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Nature expects a full grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination the supreme delight of the immortal and immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

- Nabokov

For Whom The Bell Tolls

He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.

- Ernest Hemingway

This I Believe

Like Confucius of old, I am absorbed in the wonder of earth, and the life upon it, and I cannot think of heaven and the angels. I have enough for this life. If there is no other life, than this one has been enough to make it worth being born, myself a human being. With so profound a faith in the human heart and its power to grow toward the light, I find here reason and cause enough for hope and confidence in the future of mankind.

- Helen Keller

Children

Children have no use for psychology. They detest sociology. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff. When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish illusions.

- Isaac Bashevis Singer