• “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” ~ from Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson
• “And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter. I had been ashamed to say so.” ~ from The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
• “steer clear of those women, proud in their heels their store-bought feminism, and love me

  instead, mousy-haired and well-read,” ~ from Send me to the moon by Conchitina Cruz

• “What shall we do, all of us? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?” ~ from Blood Roses by Francesca Lia Block
• “We either live happily ever after or we get killed by horrible curses.” ~ Wolf, The Tenth Kingdom
• “I don’t want to be disturbed. I have made sacrifices for this effete life of mine, at least relatively speaking, and I am comfortable. Do I lead the life of a selfish shit? So be it. I am content in my shithood.” ~ from Reunion by Alan Lightman
• “Of all the layers of dream that govern this life, the deepest and most catastrophic is that of our solitariness: only death cures it, and even then only by cessation, not awakening.” ~ from The Blind Eye by Don Paterson
• “I think when you are born an angel should say to you, hopefully kindly and not in the fake voice of an airline attendant: Here you go on this long, long dream. Don’t even try to wake up. Just let it go on until it is over. You will learn many things. Just relax and observe because there just is pain and that’s it mostly and you aren’t going to be able to escape no matter what. Eventually it will all be over anyway. Good luck.” ~ from Wolf by Francesca Lia Block
• “I am becoming hugely depressed. Like last year. Just a month ago I was better, sporting a simpler, terse pose disenchantment, a neat black vest of sadness…In my little white house I am in a slump. I look around. All these possessions, all these new things, are little teeth, death markers, my home one compact little memorial park remember when they used to be called cemeteries…[I] wonder how they got here, how I have arrived at this point of clutter. These things, things, things, my mind is shooting and I hurl appliances, earrings, wine glasses, into the kitchen trash and, gripped immediately by a zinging, many knuckled panic, pick them out again, hurry, hurry, hurry, one by one, rinse them off, put them back away, behind their doors, watch TV, breathe, watch TV.” ~ from To Fill by Lorrie Moore
• “I can see exactly what not to do at the moment. No doubt through the usual process of elimination I’ll arrive at my favourite strategy of total paralysis.” ~ from The Blind Eye by Don Paterson
• “…don’t spread yourself stupid, you’re contagious.” ~ Richard Bolisay, Digital Buryong.
• “Oh man I either need a life, a cold shower, or an English actor from Salford, with blue eyes, sexy voice.” ~ MrsWho, Christopher Eccleston Forum.
• “Sooner or later I will have to renounce my motionlessness, give up those habits of reverie, speculation and lethargy by which I currently subsist. I will have to come to grips with the real world, which is composed, I know, not of words but of drainpipes, holes in the ground, furiously multiplying weeds, hunks of granite, stacks more or less of heavy matter which must be moved from one point to the other, usually uphill. How will I handle it? Only time, which does not by any means tell everything, will tell.” ~ from Unearthing Suite by Margaret Atwood.
• “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t to forget make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” ~ from the online journal of Neil Gaiman