Marilynne Robinson

"To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."

Marilynne Robinson

Mitch Albom

"Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back."

Mitch Albom

Neil Jordan

"Is it fair to have given us the memory of what was and the desire of what could be when we must suffer what is?"

Neil Jordan (The Dream of a Beast)

Henry Van Dyke

"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity."

Henry Van Dyke

Calvin and Hobbes

“I think we dream so we don't have to be apart so long. If we're in each other's dreams, we can be together all the time.”

"Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants won't help.”

“People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.”

“We're so busy watching out for what's just ahead of us that we don't take time to enjoy where we are.”

"Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words.”

“Promise me you'll never forget me because if I thought you would I'd never leave.”

"Life is never easy for those who dream.”

“Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you.”

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”

“History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction.”

“Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine, and valleys of frustration and failure.”

e.e cummings

"i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"

e.e. cummings

On Fatherhood

"What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars."

Jodi Picoult

"With that in mind, I try to imagine the greatest gift I could've given my father. And as sleep descends on me, the answer seems strangely clear: my faith in his idols. That was what he wanted all along - to feel that we were united by something permanent, to know that as long as he and I believed in the same thing, we would never be apart."

Ian Caldwell

"We went up and up into the heavens until people were just dots below us. As we hung right at the top--the twinkling electric lights below mingling with the stars--Father said something I will never forget. He said, 'See here, Queenie. Look around. You've got the whole world at your feet, lass.'"

Andrea Levy


"...I've made it my business to observe fathers and daughters. And I've seen some incredible, beautiful things. Like the little girl who's not very cute - her teeth are funny, and her hair doesn't grow right, and she's got on thick glasses - but her father holds her hand and walks with her like she's a tiny angel that no one can touch. He gives her the best gift a woman can get in this world: protection. And the little girl learns to trust the man in her life. And all the things that the world expects from women - to be beautiful, to soothe the troubled spirit, heal the sick, care for the dying, send the greeting card, bake the cake - all of those things become the way we pay the father back for protecting us..."

Adriana Trigiani


"There are some men in this world who are born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father's one of them."

Harper Lee

James Kavanaugh

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love. For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves."

James Kavanaugh

Charles Frazier

"She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred."

Charles Frazier

Pam Houston

"I wanted her to see that the only life worth living is a life full of love; that loss is always part of the equation; that love and loss conjoined are the best opportunity we get to live fully, to be our strongest, our most compassionate, our most graceful selves. "

Pam Houston

Tana French

"The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you cracking to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands."

Tana French