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Times are always strange. Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.

- Daniel Kehlmann, The Director

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I like romance at a distance.

- Motion Sickness, Lynne Tillman

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It wouldn’t be bad to know I was in a well-plotted movie or novel, where every incident and coincidence has meaning. To be part of a mystery that would be solved. With clues strewn here and there. A mystery that I’d be able to solve.

- Motion Sickness, Lynne Tillman

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The world was, day by day, becoming a more convenient, and unromantic, place.

- Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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A book that sits on a shelf is nothing but a bundle of paper. Unless it is opened, a book possessing a great power or an epic story is mere scraps of paper. But a book that has been cherished and loved, filled with human thoughts; has been endowed with a soul.

- Sosuke Natsukawa, The Cat Who Saved Books

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They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again.

- Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies

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I’d never been to New York. Nobody had. But the people I grew up with felt glamorous watching films, listening to records, or reading books written by people who unfolded their lives, who told of the time they loved and the time they died and the time they danced at El Morocco. We loved black-and-white stills depicting the comedy and the tragedy of private life, or of public life gone wrong. The main characters in my childhood believed in realism in art, they loved quoting from it, but they also loved it’s very opposite, pitching themselves as far from reality as they could, knowing fine well that life would be all too real on Monday.

- Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies

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Because a living person has their own reality, he says. The person who’s gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they’re gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don’t think about him, literally, I’m ending his existence.

- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

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But now that the event has come and gone, the funeral, the various rituals, only the loss remains, which can never be recuperated. The event is over, the event has been overcome, and yet the loss is only beginning. Every day, it grows deeper, more and more is forgotten, less and less really known for certain.

- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

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No one is perfect. Sometimes you need peo le to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you. And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing, you’re the person who lets everyone down, who fails to make anything better, and you hate yourself so much you wish you were dead.

- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

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Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction—which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective—is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.

- Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

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Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.

- Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

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When I was small, before drinking and men and the rest, books were the thing that could absorb me entirely and let me forget myself.

- Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

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And I was sad for him that he had had a child at all if it meant his happiness was tied to mine always. I was sad I wasn’t able to learn to be happier, more regular and peaceful, because it meant he would never have that peace for himself, which he of all people deserved and had waited for.

- Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

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And then, whenever I fall in love, everything is made new, including myself. My body, my brain, the way I see the simplest things. And the best part is it doesn’t even have to be the first time to work. If I fuck it up once, the next time works just as well.

- Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

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What I am trying to say is what you already know—that life is a tragedy but that it also has its attending joys.

- Charlie Chaplin, in a letter to Clifford Odets

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It became instantly and irrevocably clear that the drinking was only a sideshow. The drinking, the not-drinking, would change nothing of this despair which was a part of him and always would be. It was a terrifying and liberating idea.

- Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings