“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.”

The Silence of the Sirens, Franz Kafka

“Simple words can be reduced to obscenities by my tongue, can they not? Wife... husband... love?”

Phantom, Susan Kay

“You'd think that I wouldn't remember... But I recall everything. Everything. I was cursed with these extraordinary powers of recollection...”

Phantom, Susan Kay Recommended by Sibyl.

“Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slip cover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.”

Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”

Helen Keller

“What is the feeling when you're driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”

On The Road, Jack Kerouac

“People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, 'I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die,' a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.”

The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

Soren Kierkegaard

“HANZO: Revenge is never a straight line. It's a forest. And like a forest it's easy to lose your way...to get lost... to forget where you came in.”

Kill Bill Vol. 1 [movie]

“I wish I could remember. I wish memory were a more steady, more physical artifact. It's just a breeze, or a scent barely detected and fading.”

The Solace Of Leaving Early, Haven Kimmel

“Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”

It, Stephen King

“He saw the shape behind the shape: saw lights, saw an endless crawling hairy thing which was made of light and nothing else, orange light, dead light that mocked life.”

It, Stephen King

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.”

The Body, Stephen King

“To follow one star is to concede the power of some greater force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER.”

The Stand, Stephen King

“How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?”

Another Night in the Ruins, Galway Kinnell

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

Rudyard Kipling

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Me and Bobby McGee, Kris Kristofferson Recommended by James.

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

“Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball. Yes, a children's ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler's time, in Stalin's time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague for behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

“In languages that form the word 'compassion' not from the root 'suffering' but from the root 'feeling', the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion - joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. The kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, wspolzucie, migefuhl, medkansla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

“Surely she, too, had harbored the blissful hope of using her body as a poster for her soul.”

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

“It's the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.”

Angels In America, Tony Kushner

“Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.... God! It's been years since I was on a plane! When we hit 35,000 feet, we'll have hit the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I'll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening... But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing's lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that's so.”

Angels In America, Tony Kushner

“Some fear the dark; I embrace it. It is the only place where my eyes are blind, and my soul wanders freely from the truth of reality.”

Laura

“You hurt people desperately in order to protect your lies, which have become like children to you--gnawing, desperate children not content to suck every drop of milk from your breast, because they are always hungry. So they bite into the nipple itself, they devour the flesh itself, and still you protect them. The problem ceases to be that you cannot live without your lies so much as that your lies cannot live without you.”

While England Sleeps, David Leavitt