She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”

—J. D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”

 

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart; I am, I am, I am.”

—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

 

“‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.'”

—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

 

“The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

 

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

 

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”

—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

 

“America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”

—Allen Ginsburg, “America”

 

“It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.”

—W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

 

“We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the presumption that once our eyes watered.”

—Tom Stoppard, Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead