"But I'll tell you a terrible secret - Are you listening to me? There isn't anyone out there who isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don;t you know that?"

--J.D. Salinger, 'Franny and Zooey'

'Don't you want to join us?' I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. 'No, I don't', I said.

-Kafka

The happiness of being with people.

-Kafka

-- in 'Franny and Zooey', J.D. Salinger

"You can always tell a real friend; when you've made a fool of yourself, he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job."

The experience of a poem is the experience of a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives inside a deeper and a calmer feeling.

- T.S.Eliot, on Dante.

“Solitude begets the original, the risky and unfamiliar beauty, begets poetry. But solitude also begets the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and illict”.
- Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

For it is a peculiarity of persons who lead rich emotional lives and who (as the saying is) live intensely and with a wild poetry, that they read all kinds of meanings into comparatively simple actions, especially the actions of other people, who do not live intensely and with a wild poetry. Thus you may find them weeping passionately on their bed, and be told that you- and you alone- are the cause because you said that awful thing to them at lunch.

--Stella Gibbons, 'Cold Comfort Farm'

'Goodbye. Don't forget to feed the parrot!', shrieked Flora, who disliked this prolongation of the ceremony of saying farewell, as every civilised traveller must.

'What parrot?' they all shrieked back from the fast-receding platform, just as they were meant to do.

But it was too much trouble to reply. Flora contented herself with muttering, 'Oh, any parrot, bless you all'...

--Stella Gibbons, 'Cold Comfort Farm'

Kumar: You're worthless.

Harold: I'm not... worthwhile.

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits- like becoming a prime minister or a millionaire, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First -rate pursuits, involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding - inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napolean, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable.

--Malcolm Muggeridge.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge