"Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was."

from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"There is always something left to love"

from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"The world she was walking through was a pale nothingness, like a blank sheet of paper or an enormous, empty white room. It had no temperature, no smell, no texture, and no taste."

Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (via haifinn)

"I don’t want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead."

From Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood

"The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

from A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf

"If you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else."

from so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

"The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it—basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them."

from Tales of Ordinary Madness, by Charles Bukowski

"We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing."

from The Captain is Out to Lunch… by Charles Bukowski

"A light here required a shadow there."

from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

"I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together."

from Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

"Where passion is married to intelligence, you may find genius, neurosis, madness or rapture."

from The Mysteries of Berkeley, by Michael Chabon

The Fall

“Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” 

—Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.” 

—Albert Camus

The Stranger

“There is not love of life without despair about life.” —Albert Camus

Lady Windermere’s Fan

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” —Oscar Wilde