We've still got the taste dancing on our tongues

"I am suddenly consumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret."

--Audrey Niffenegger, 'The Time Traveler's Wife

"I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air."

--Margaret Atwood

"Do stuff... be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager, stay eager."

--Susan Sontag

“Something wonderful, if you took the long view, was about to happen. If you took the short or medium view, something terrible was about to happen. It’s like the difference between seeing a beautiful new star in the winter sky and actually being close to the supernova. It’s the difference between the beauty of morning dew on a cobweb and actually being a fly.”

--Terry Pratchett

"We've still got the taste dancing on our tongues"

--Ellie Goulding

“Sanity is a cozy lie.”

--Susan Sontag

“His soul sounds like my drums and looks like doves. He is fireworks. He is the black-haired angel playing his bass on the top of the tree, on the top of the cake. I want him to see the flowers in my eyes and hear the songs in my hands.”

--Francesca Lia Block

Don't leave. Please. Stay. It's nice to be in the dark, right? You can relax a little. No brittle smiles. No air kisses. No sarcasm. Forget the stress. The worry. The petty skirmishes. Life is too short. Too short for cruelty. Close your eyes.

"Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life."

--Norton Juster, 'The Phantom Tollbooth'

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

--Norton Juster, 'The Phantom Tollbooth'

"She seems to have thoughts and emotions. Sometimes I think I understand them, but often I don't. Like a photograph, she cannot say what she let's me see. She is an embodied secret. And I must be a photograph to her."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Eating Animals'

"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Eating Animals'

"Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it."

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Eating Animals'

"The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures... Whose charms were broken if revealed."

--Charlotte Brontë

"Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity."

--Vladimir Nabokov

"And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears."

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Lolita'

"Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness."

--Vladimir Nabokov, 'Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977'

"Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life."

--Ellen Bass