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He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. -- Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself. ˜ Another short fit of abstraction followed, when, shaking it off, she thus attacked her companion. ˜ [...] formed such a contrast with his early opinion on the subject [...] as time is for ever producing between the plans and decisions of mortals, for their own instruction, and their neighbours' entertainment. -- Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

The sun was sharp; I was sweating in my woman-travelling-alone modest outfit. ˜ Real life has such a hard time learning poetry. -- Githa Hariharan, Almost Home

Oh. if life were made of moments, Even now and then a bad one! But if life were only moments, Then you'd never know you had one. [...] Let the moment go... Don't forget it for a moment, though. Just remembering you've had an "and", When you're back to "or", Makes the "or" mean more Than it did before. Now I understand. ~ "Moments in the Woods", Into the Woods

Servant: [...] I pray, sir, can you read? Romeo: Ay, mine own fortune in my misery. -- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

"Each individual misfortune, to be sure, seems an exceptional occurence; but misfortune in general is the rule." "...the negativity of well-being and happiness, in antithesis to the positivity of pain." "...the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes." "The scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful." "We shall do best to think of life as a desengano, as a process of disillusionment: since this is, clearly enough, what everything that happens to us is calculated to produce." "People who pass their lives in reading and acquire their wisdom from books are like those who learn about a country from travel descriptions: they can impart information about a great number of things, but at bottom they possess no collected, ...

"I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together." "It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural." "...it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague." -- Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

From A Little Book of Happiness compiled by Ruskin Bond, The secret of happiness is to find a congenial monotony. -- V.S. Pritchett Happiness is not waiting to be found; there's no use looking for it. All we need to do is find the barriers within ourselves that we have built against it. Trust -- in people, in life -- is a good way to begin. We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. -- E.M. Forster Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another. -- Jerome K. Jerome The adventure is not in arriving, it's in the on-the-way experience. It is not in the expected; it's in the surprise. You are not choosing what you shall see in the world, but giving the world an even chance to see you, to get to know you, and, perhaps, show you just the things you had longed to see but could never find. Sometimes, when all else fails, a sense of humour comes to the...

You attract what you are ready for. -- Which do you want: the pain of staying where you are or the pain of growth? -- Judith Hanson Lasater

Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars. Every nigger you see got a kingdom in his head. -- Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece, after all." —Nathan W. Morris

"What will survive of us is love." - Philip Larkin, 'An Arundel Tomb'

"the weight of too much liberty" - William Wordsworth, Nuns Fret Not

"The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time." - David Bowie

Love after love - Derek Walcott The time will come  when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. ~~~

SONNET I don't think that I've been in love as such, Although I liked a few folk pretty well. Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch, For brave men died and empires rose and fell For love: girls followed boys to foreign lands And men have followed women into Hell. In plays and poems someone understands There's something makes us more than blood and bone And more than biological demands... For me, love's like the wind, unseen, unknown. I see the trees are bending where it's been, I know that it leaves wreckage where it's blown. I really don't know what "I love you" means. I think it means "Don't leave me here alone." ~ Neil Gaiman

We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. - How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves. - I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was. ~ Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending