C.G. Hanzlicek

If you want to say this life
Is merely the bridge
To the life we're asked to dream of,
You are my enemy.

C.G. Hanzlicek

…death will hold up a mirror
we are meant to measure our lives in.

Corrinne Clegg Hales

If you work fast, and have a strong stomach,
there's a chance
to do good in the world.

Goya

I've no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell, I lack everything—all I've got left is will.

Gide

I love life passionately, but I don't trust it.

Paul Fussell

It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning.

T.S. Eliot

You are the music while the music lasts.

James Dickey

The poet is not trying to tell the truth; he's trying to make it, and he tries to make a different version of it from the official version that God made or the world made.

Degas

We see what we want to see, and from this falsification comes art.

Colette

Who says you should be happy? Do your work.

Sonya Chung

I want this to be the year of finishing things.

Chekhov

The soul of another is wrapped in darkness.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think plots desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Montgomery "Monty" Burns

Push out the jive,
bring in the love.

Beethoven

Love demands everything, and that very justly.

Balzac

Behind every great fortune lies a crime.

Chomsky

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Marcus Aurelius

In a man's life
his time is but a moment, his being a mere flux,
his senses a dim glimpse, his body food for the worms,
and his soul a restless eddy…
the things of the body pass like a flowing stream;
life is a brief sojourn;
and one's mark in this world
is soon forgotten.