Oscar Wilde

"There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

- From Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray

Charlotte Bronte

“The human heart has hidden treasure, in secret kept, in silence sealed; the thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasure, whose charms were broken it revealed.”

Charles Baxter

“The worst mistakes I’ve made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.”

Raymond Carver

“‘I’m the one going crazy,’ he said and then nodded his head in agreement.”

- Raymond Carver’s short story, “Jerry and Molly and Sam”

Stephen Elliott

"Sometimes I think of this depression setting its hooks in me as a failure of my file system. I call up files I shouldn’t be thinking of. I mislabel documents and store them in a folder I’d rather bury."

"We understand the world by how we retrieve memories, re-order information into stories to justify how we feel."

"A stranger can see in an instant something in you that you might spend years learning about yourself."

"How much forgiveness it must take to love a person, to choose not to see their flaws, or to see those flaws and love the person anyway. If you never forgive, you’ll always be alone."

Mary Karr

"Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild."

"He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo."

"Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name."

Iain Reid

“Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought.”

“Every story is made up. Even the real ones.”