“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.” — Victor Hugo
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” — Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“There’s more to life than increasing its speed.” — Gandhi
“I think you’re made of very, very good stuff.” — Emily Deschanel, Bones
“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Sometimes it’s the smallest decisions that can change your life forever.” — Keri Russell, Felecity
“I am not a has-been. I am a will be.” — Lauren Bacall
“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.” — Neil Gaiman, American Gods
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” — Maya Angelou
“There’s no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.” — David Levithan, Love is the Higher Law
“Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.” — Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home
“I record my life, sifting and trying to separate what is real from what I’ve dreamed. I have decided not to tell you what is fact versus what is unfact primarily because (a) I am giving you a portrait of the essence of me, and (b) because, living where I do, living in the chasm that cuts through thought, it is lonely… come with me, reader. I am toying with you, yes, but for a real reason. I am asking you to enter the confusion with me, to give up the ground with me, because sometimes that frightening floaty place is really the truest of all. Kierkegaard says, ‘The greatest lie of all is the feeling of firmness beneath our feet. We are most honest when we are lost.’ Enter that lostness with me. Live in the place I am, where the view is murky, where the connecting bridges and orienting maps have been surgically stripped away.” — Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
“‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave and we looked over the hill and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the West and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.” — Rob Lowe, The West Wing
“Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.” — Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl