George Bernard Shaw

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

George Bernard Shaw

Jeanette Winterson

"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had."

Jeanette Winterson

Jodi Picoult

"In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future."

Jodi Picoult

Emily Giffin

"Maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice, again and again, day in and day out, year after year, says more about love than never having a choice to make at all."

Emily Giffin

Sherman Alexie

"He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day.
Choice: that was the thing."

Sherman Alexie

Stephenie Meyer

I didn't know if there ever was a choice, really. I was already in too deep. Now that I knew - if I knew - I could do nothing about my secret. Because when I thought of him, of his voice, his hypnotic eyes, the magnetic force of his personality, I wanted nothing more than to be with him ... "

Stephenie Meyer

John Steinbeck

"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’"

John Steinbeck

Sylvia Plath

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."

Sylvia Plath

J.K. Rowling

"It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities."

J.K. Rowling

Jorge Luis Borges

"You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened."

Jorge Luis Borges

Anaïs Nin

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

Andre Maurois

"In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."

Andre Maurois