Dante Alighieri
- The Divine Comedy: Inferno
Up on your feet! This is no time to tire! The man who lies asleep will never waken fame, and his desire and all his life drift past him like a dream, and the traces of his memory fade from time like smoke in air, or ripples on a stream.
Stanisław Lem
- Solaris
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
H.P. Lovecraft
- The Rats in the Walls
My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying, gently rising, rising as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black putrid sea. Something bumped into me - something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Idiot
Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve?
Alexandre Dumas
- The Count of Monte Cristo
So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have some bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts.
Ray Bradbury
- Fahrenheit 451
The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.
Shrek
- Shrek (2001)
I'm not the one with the problem, okay? It's the world that seems to have a problem with me. People take one look at me and go "Arrrgh! Help! Run! A big, stupid, ugly ogre!" They judge me before they even know me. That's why I'm better off alone.
H.P. Lovecraft
- Cats and Dogs
Naturally, one's preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly upon one's temperament and point of view. Dog-lovers base their whole case on commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities, and amusingly judge the intelligence of a pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes. Cat-lovers repudiate the idea that cringing subservience and sidling companionship to man are supreme merits, and stand free to worship aristocratic independence, self-respect, and individual personality.
