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. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

-Neil Gaiman

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
- Ray Bradbury, author Fahrenheit 451

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.

-Grace Paley

Fear explored can be an ally.

- Sark, Living Juicy, August 22.

Each time I have tried to communicate with someone, love has disappeared.
- Valentina Gherardini (Monica Vitti), La Notte, by Michelangelo Antonioni

But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man
That he didn’t, didn’t already have
- Tin man, America

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.

-Edith Wharton

To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled – because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
– Edith Wharton