Ralph Waldo Emerson

Success:

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by
a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kirsten Dewar

"I dread the day, coming round the corner I'll walk into him. I'm just not prepared to handle that. Because although he's gone from my life, he is no way absent. I wish I could move on. I've tried. But he's got his hook in me, and I can't seem to work it loose ... "

Sally Vickers

"The desire to be loved is as basic a need as that for physical sustenance. But to take delight in being loved requires nerve. For where life is most ardently awakened, it can be most excruciatingly extinguished and the fear of that possibility can tragically become the wet blanket which smothers the most sacred of... flames ... "

Sally Vickers (The Other Side of You)

Sally Vickers

"It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is rather that we would be crippled by what we lack, than face the consequences of placing our secret selves into another's hands ... "

Sally Vickers (The Other Side of You)

Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night ..."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Chuck Palahniuk

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice."

Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

Arundhati Roy

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

Arundhati Roy

Paulo Coelho

"Our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives."

Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)

John Greenleaf Whittier

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'"

John Greenleaf Whittier (Maud Muller - Pamphlet)

Chuck Palahniuk

"When we don't know who to hate, we hate ourselves."

Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)