Kazuo Ishiguro
- Never Let Me Go
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don't go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't ever see them fading.
John Steinbeck
- East of Eden
A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?
Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina
We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.
Nina Guilbeau
When you lose someone, you get used to living day to day without them. But you'll never get used to the "10 second heartbreak." That's the time it takes to wake to full consciousness each day and remember...
Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Gay Science
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'
Jandy Nelson
- The Sky is Everywhere
My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.
Virginia Woolf
What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me, but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
- Tiger Lily
I like to think that nothing's final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don't, That it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, That you and I are always young in the woods, and that I'll see you sometime again, even if it's not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand.
Tom Stoppard
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever.
Adam Silvera
- They Both Die at the End
I cannot tell you how you will survive without me. I cannot tell you how to mourn me. I cannot convince you to not feel guilty if you forget the anniversary of my death, or if you realize days or weeks or months have gone by without thinking about me. I just want you to live.
Elizabeth Gilbert
- Eat, Pray, Love
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
Ayn Rand
- Anthem
I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
E.M. Forster
- A Room with a View
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
Haruki Murakami
- Kafka on the Shore
That's how stories happen - with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
Lidia Yuknavitch
- The Chronology of Water
I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.
Jane Austen
- Persuasion
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.
