a nice quiet place

"Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Nice Quiet Place
-Photo: Shishi Yamazaki (x)

tender is the night

"And she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
-Photographer: Unknown (x)

great expectations

"We changed again, and yet again, it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had solemnly risen now and the world lay spread before me."

-Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
-Photo: Earth and Moon in a single frame, September 18, 1977 (x)

fly

"You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down."

-Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

-Photo: unkown (x)

a room of one's own

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of the mind."

-A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
-Photo: Duke of Humphrey's Library, Oxford University, England (x)

great bursts

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

-The Great Gatsby,  F. Scott Fitzgerald
-Photo: Colin Leaman (x)

air on fire

"We set the air on fire between us."

-White Oleander, Janet Finch
-Photo via

the five people

"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it.You're just passing it on to someone else."

-The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom
-Painting: "Mother with Children," Gustav Klimt, 1910 (via)

how forgiveness budded

"I wondered if that's how forgiveness budded; not with fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."

-Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
-Image: light house keeper in the desert sun

slaughterhouse five

"But she did look back, and I loved her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
-Photo: Stephen Shames (via)

murakami

"What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back."

-Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
-Photo: Albert Levy (via)