“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here.”

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.”

“She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.”

“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”

“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

“This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”

“One may be drunk with love without being any nearer to finding his mate...Love must be as much a light as a flame.”

“He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor.”

“Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.”

“This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it”

“If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame." No:”

“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”

“There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.”