I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.

-Emily Brontë

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I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? 

-Emily Brontë

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

-Emily Dickens 

I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way.

-Virginia Woolf 

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

-Virginia Woolf

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

-Virginia Woolf

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Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

-Virginia Woolf 

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These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

- Virginia Woolf

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My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

-Virginia Woolf

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter much, do they?

-Virginia Woolf

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I am rooted, but I flow. 

All gold, flowing.

-Virginia Woolf

All I know is what I wonder: Which of my feelings are real? Which of the mes is me? 

-Jennifer Niven, all the bright places

He's the one. And some thoughts once thought are very hard to unthink.

-Jandy Nelson, I'll give you the sun

Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

-Jandy Nelson, I'll give you the sun

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."

-Albert Camus, the stranger

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My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns into a teeny-tiny glacier.

-Jandy Nelson, I'll give you the sun

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.” Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things."

-Jandy Nelson, I'll give you the sun

I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty…

-Kathleen Glasgow, girl in peices 

"Because while I say sadness what I really mean is black hole inside me filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don't have anymore"

-Kathleen Glasgow, girl in pieces 

"I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God."

-John Green, looking for Alaska

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."

"We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did"

-John Green, looking for alaska

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."

-John Green, looking for Alaska