( one )
I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting. 
( The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton )


( two )
To live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will destroy you for certain - leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can find no root in his heart. 
( Elantris by Brandon Sanderson )


( three )
I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken. 
( The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery )


( four )
It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and i's all over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed. 
( Delirium by Lauren Oliver )


( five )
This is what happiness is, past the rubbish of its overuse as a word, past the cracked gloss of the letters that mean nothing when strung together. They mean something now, and I know what it's like when you and someone else are right togheter. How simple it is, and how amazing. 
( The Unwritten Rule by Elizabeth Scott )


( six )
At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end, I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by. 
( Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel )


( seven )
Have you ever 
had so much to say 
that your mouth closed up tight 
struggling to harness 
the nuclear force 
coalescing within your words? 

Have you ever 
had so many thoughts 
churning inside you that you didn't 
dare let them escape 
in case they blew you wide open? 

Have you ever 
couldn't look in the mirror 
for fear of finding the face of evil 
glaring back at you? 
( Crank by Ellen Hopkins )


( eight )
But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it? 
( Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin )


( nine )
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up.
( Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk )


( ten )
Goodbye Norma Jean from young man in 22nd row who sees you as something more than sexual, more than just our Marilyn Monroe. 
( Candle in the Wind | Elton John )

( one )
Figure out what it is you don't do very well, and then don't do it. I'm not beating myself up about doing everything perfectly. The litmus test I always use for myself is: "Okay, if you won 20 million tomorrow in the lottery, would you still be doing the same thing you are doing now with your life, Doug?" The answer is "Yes." I'm always very conscious of that. 
( Douglas Coupland )


( two )
I didn't want to give you the one last part of myself that I couldn't take back. And then you were gone and I realized it was already yours. It had been since the beginning. Except that I hadn't told you. It drove me mad, the thought that you would never know. 

( Dreaming of You by Lisa Kleypas )


( three )
I took his wildness from him and tried to fold it into myself, filling up the empty spaces, all those second place finishes left behind. 
( Dreamland by Sarah Dessen )


( four )
You've got to find yourself first. Everything else will follow. 
( Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint )


( five )
That's the thing about being a victim; you start to think it'll happen to you on a regular basis. It's living with the reality of your own vulnerability, and it sucks. 
( A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane )


( six )
I feel no pleasure in his compliment or his touch, only impatience. This is the only feeling. I feel like the paper on which my mood chart is printed. 
( Dry by Augusten Burroughs )


( seven )
I am reminded of the advice of my neighbour. "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating." 
( E.B. White )


( eight )
When a child first catches adults out - when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just - his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all his safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again  they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing. 

( East of Eden by John Steinbeck )


( nine )
I would spin into a panic of loneliness and meticulously details suicidal thoughts. Every part of my body pained me. I felt like I was some kind of primitive spring-loaded machine, placed under far more tension than it had ever been built to sustain, about to blast apart at great danger to anyone standing nearby. I imagined my body parts flying off my torso in order to escape the volcanic core of unhappiness that had become me. 
( Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert )


( ten )
It was the books I started reading. It was the music I started listening to. It was the television I started watching. I found myself thinking again. I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn't. 
When all this is in your head, it has to come out into your life. If it doesn't, you get crushed. I'm not going to get crushed. 
( Ecstasy by Irvine Welsh )

( one )
A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go. 
( Northern Exposure )


( two )
Rich people don't like to tolerate much. Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping. 
( Diary by Chuck Palahniuk )


( three )
Why do you still run when you could walk with me? Life will pass you by when you move this quickly. What can you see when you're spinning around? Do you have a little time for me? 
( Do You Have a Little Time | Dido )


( four )
You know I'm gonna find the time to catch you and make you stay. I don't care what clothes you wear, it's time to love and I don't care. 
( Find a Way | Safetysuit )


( five )
It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give. 
( The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin )


( six )
Moral #1: If you work hard, stay focussed and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life. 
Moral #2: Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us. 
( Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller )


( seven )
People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years. 
( I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson )


( eight )
I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted. 
( Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison )


( nine )
I think that the measure of whether a life has been a good one is how much love there has been in that life - love both given and received. 
( The Double Comfort Safari Club by Alexander McCall Smith )


( ten )
We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other. 
( The Double by Jose Saramago )

( one )
Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for yourself and ask nothing of others; and grab all the fun you can. Don't give much thought to yesterday, don't worry about tomorrow, live in the moment and trust that your existence has meaning even when the world seems to be all blind chance an chaos. When life lends a hammer blow in your face, do your best to respond to the hammer as if it had been a cream pie. 
( Seize the Night by Dean Koontz )


( two )
You and me have seen everything to see from Bangkok to Calgary and the soles of your shoes are all worn down. The time for sleep is now, but it's nothing to cry about 'cause we'll hold each other soon in the blackest of rooms. 
( I Will Follow You Into the Dark | Death Cab for Cutie )


( three )
In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt? 
( Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke )


( four )
I know there's something here, there's more than meets the eye. More strange, more beautiful than these words can describe. Don't know how I got here, the past has come and gone. I just know I have found the place my heart belongs. And I want to stay. I feel safe here in your light. This must be what heaven's like, must be angels in the room tonight. So much here in this world I'll never understand. I"ll have to learn to trust, I'll do the best I can. All the mistakes I've made, the wrong turns on this road have only lead me to your arms and all I know. 
( Angels in the Room | Delta Goodrem )


( five )
Death is inevitable, it's a promise made to each of us at birth. But before that promise is kept, we want something to happen to us, whether it is the thrill of romance, the joy of raising a family or the anguish of great loss. We all hope to experience something to make our lives meaningful but the sad fact is, not all lives have meaning. Some people spend their time on this planet just sitting on the sidelines waiting for something to happen to them before it's too late. 
( Desperate Housewives )


( six )
Oh, two things I don't like when I'm trying to get my groove is a partner that meets me only half way and just can't prove. Take me out so deep when you know you can't swim. Need a lifeguard and I need protection. So put it on me deep in the right direction. 
( Lose My Breath | Destiny's Child )


( seven )
You know the incredible thing about hearts is their unbelievable capacity for forgiveness. You'd be amazed what people will overlook when they love someone. 
( Devil May Cry by Sherrilyn Kenyon )


( eight )
In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes and the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toil and suffering. 
( Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay )


( nine )
As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Any time we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel. 
( Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay )


( ten )
I just know there's something dark in me and I hie it. I certainly don't talk about it, but it's there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he's driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness. I don't fight him, I don't want to. He's all I've got. Nothing else could love me, not even, especially, not me. Or is that just a lie the Dark Passenger tells me? Because lately there are these moments when I feel connected to something else, someone. It's like the mask is slipping and things, people, who never mattered before are suddenly starting to matter. It scares the hell out of me. 
( Dexter )

( one )
All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had to keep out the loneliness. 
( Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier )

( two )
Your hand and mouth agreed many years ago that as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain. 
( Dave Barry )

( three )
There's nothing to be gained from passive observance, the simple documenting of conditions, because, at its core, it sets a bad example. Every time something is observed and not fixed, or when one has a chance to give in some way and does not, there is a lie being told, the same lie we all know by heart but which needn't be reiterated.
( Dave Eggers )

( four )
Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way? 
( How Beautiful the Ordinary by Various Authors )

( five )
Because finally 
after all this struggle
and all these years, 
you don't want to any more, 
you've simply had enough 
of drowning 
and you want to live and you 
want to love and you will 
walk across any territory 
and any darkness, 
however fluid and however 
dangerous, to take the 
one hand you know

belongs in yours. 
( The Truelove by David Whyte )

( six )
There is something 
comforting 
about a lighthouse. 
In the dark of the night, 
hold on to the light, 
and you'll get
back home safely. 

I need a personal lifehouse. 
( The Day Before by Lisa Schroeder )

( seven )
It's so crazy how it'd make my week just to hear them mention your name. Is it so hard to understand how you've got me right in the palm of your hand? 
( Your Way with Words is Through Silence | A Day to Remember )


( eight )
Love is a wreck. Love isn't still. Don't you know I showed you my neck just to see if you would kill? Figure it out, it's sinking in. Now i's not a matter of if, it's just a matter of when. 
( The Last Time | The Daylights )


( nine )
What you cannot escape, you must fight; what you cannot fight, you must endure. 
( Dead Man Rising by Lilith Saintcrow )

 

( ten )
I realize that life is risks. It's acknowledging the past but looking forward. It's taking a chance that we all make mistakes but believing that we all deserve to be forgiven. 
( The Dead-Tossed Waves by Carrie Ryan )