“Now shut the fuck up and watch some MTV.”

“My heart is making a dull, drumming sound and I’m thinking that my life is a waiting game and I’m sinkin’ all the while.”

“She left an empty house in my heart. The lights don’t work anymore, the heater’s broken.”

“America is seething at all times. It's like a Gaza Strip that's three thousand miles long.”

“Sometimes it’s hard to convince yourself that you’re not an idiot.”

“I wish I wasn’t alive as much as you are dead”

“What is this bullshit? 97% caffeine free is 97% not my kind of thing.”

“I don’t ask for much. I should ask for a lot, then maybe I might get some.”

“I’m sorry for not being sorry that I’m not sorry”

“All bullshit and no death and mutilated assholes makes Jack a dull boy, dull and tense.”

“Jangles my nerves like a tambourine of razors.”

“Yesterday wants to pull me in, pull me down and starve me.”

“Sleep is my escape. It gives me a break from the ceaseless self awareness that I choke on.”

“You’re going to do what you’re going to do and that’s all there is. That’s all you got and that’s that.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”

“All good things are wild and free.”

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.”

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”

“Things do not change; we change.”

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.”

“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.”

“All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.”

“As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

“An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”