Sarah Dunn

"There was a guy roasting chestnuts on the street corner, and the smell wafted over, hinting at the coming winter, but in a good way, in the way that makes you think about Christmas and snow days and fires crackling away in fireplaces."

Sarah Dunn

Sarah Dunn (Secrets to Happiness: A Novel)

"She never got a chance to fall out of love, to do it properly, slowly and thoroughly, and the result was he was like a phantom limb. Gone but still there. And like a true phantom limb, the preponderance of feelings associated with him were painful.

Sarah Dunn (Secrets to Happiness: A Novel)

St. Augustine

"Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being "in love" which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two."

St. Augustine

J.M. Barrie

"You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always think of you."

J.M. Barrie

Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

"Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share."

Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

David Benioff (City of Thieves)

"I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed."

David Benioff (City of Thieves)

Poppy Z. Brite

"The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets."

Poppy Z. Brite

One Tree Hill (Peyton Sawyer)

"And so I wish for patience, and grace, and strength to just let him be happy. Mostly I pray for the strength to not make his life worse because of what I want. That's the toughest part, letting go, you know? That's the part that really sucks."

One Tree Hill (Peyton Sawyer)

Stephenie Meyer

"I used to think of you that way, you know. Like the sun. My personal sun. You balanced out the clouds nicely for me."

Stephenie Meyer

John Bunyan

"You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you."

John Bunyan