New Favorite Quote

"My life is spent in one long effort to escape
from the commonplaces of existence."

- Arthur Conan Doyle, via Sherlock Holmes,
in the story The Red-headed League (fitting, no?)

Other fave quotes:

"Mind the gap -- it's the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is."
- Notes on a Scandal

"We are all lost, each in our own terrifying ludicrous desert that seems to stretch on for eternity."
- Shalom Auslander, Foreskin's Lament

"Sleep is gross, a form of abandonment, and it is impossible for anyone to awake and observe its sordid consequences save with a faint sense of recent dissipation, of minute personal disquiet and remorse."
- Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude

"How can any man who has the gall to put a brush to pure white canvas be called modest?"
- Dawn Powell, The Wicked Pavilion

"If books were anything like real life nobody'd want to waste time reading 'em."
- Dawn Powell, My Home Is Far Away

"It is impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described..."
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“I would know that in any city at an hour like this, there are people sleeping. That most people are sleeping. But that in any city, in any cluster of people, there are a few people who are awake at this hour, who are both awake and dancing, and it’s here that we need to be. That if we are living as we are this week, that we had to be awake with the people who were still dancing.”
- Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity

"And minds without emotions are really not minds at all. They are souls on ice - cold, lifeless creatures devoid of any desires, fears, sorrows, pains, or pleasures."
- Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain

"When all else fails, you always have delusion. If you can laugh at yourself, loud and hard, every time you fall, people will think you’re drunk."
- Conan O'Brien

"Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray."
- John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

"There're no absolutes in life, only in vodka"
- Homicide: Life on the Street

"The sentimental person thinks things will last - the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

"Every now and then say, 'What the fuck.' 'What the fuck' gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future"
- Risky Business