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“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story

“Everything I’ve never done, I want to do with you.”
― William Chapman

“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“My mother said I could be anything I wanted - but I chose to live.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Our hands empty except for our hands.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life
the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.
& I was free.”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“Let me begin again.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother

“[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.”
― E. M. Cioran

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
― Michel Foucault

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
― Michel Foucault

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul”
― John Muir

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time