Quotations
"'But the trouble is there aren't any bends in my road. I can see it stretching straight out before me to the sky-line…endless monotony. Oh, does life ever frighten you, Anne, with its blankness…its swarms of cold, uninteresting people?'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars

"We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement." -George Eliot, Middlemarch

Quotations
"But as she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her, the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition.  It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed.  There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable." -Kate Chopin, The Awakening

"In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her, she awoke — not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow." -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"…This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor–then the letting go—" -Emily Dickinson, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"

Quotation
"'I did not mean to quarrel,' said Rosamond, putting on her hat.
'Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?'" -George Eliot, Middlemarch

Quotations
"Oh, mother, if only you knew how I am forging a soul! How fortunate to have these two years! I am fighting, fighting, and I am making a self, in great pain, often, as for a birth, but it is right that it should be so, and I am being refined in the fires of pain and love." -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

"The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it's all written there." -Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (Translated by Alan R. Clarke)

"'Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.'" -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamond's fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes…" -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen." -James Joyce, "A Little Cloud"

"There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand." -Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

"It is only when one has grown old and dull that the soul is heavy and refuses to rise." -Kate Douglas Wiggins, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm

"It has come to my attention that your soul is in need of saving. Well, with all of your vice and your scorn. You spend a lot of time doing bad things, don't you? You might be asking yourself. How can I get into heaven? The truth is, there is no way. There is no heaven. The answer to Man's most asked question therefore has no answer. Let me tell you a story…" -Dorothea Lasky, "Dear Friend,"

"…Once at a funeral, a man had died
And with the prayers said, his soul flew up in a hurry
Like it had been let out of something awful
It was strangely colored, that soul.
And it was a funny shape and a funny temperature.
As it blew away, all of us looking felt the cold." -Dorothea Lasky, "Love Poem"

Quotation
"'I suppose one gets a habit of doing without happiness or hope.'" -George Eliot, Middlemarch

Quotations
"'Look, do you see that poem?' she said suddenly, pointing." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

"'I should rather call it a picture,' said Jane. 'A poem is lines and verses.'
'Oh dear me, no.' Anne shook her head with its fluffy wild cherry coronal positively. 'The lines and verses are only the outward garments of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces are you Jane. The real poem is the soul within them…and that beautiful bit is the soul of an unwritten poem. It is not every day one sees a soul…even of a poem.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

"Everybody who has ever lived in the world and could string two rhymes together has written a poem on spring. It is the most be-rhymed subject in the world – and always will be, because it is poetry incarnate itself. You can never be a real poet if you haven't made at least one poem about spring." -L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon

"I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time.  Now all I read is poetry.  Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.  I don't know if you follow me, Professor.  Only poetry – and let me be clear, only some of it – is good for you, only poetry isn't shit." -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"'To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.'" -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"'I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.'" -J.D. Salinger, "Teddy," Nine Stories

"…a poem is like a rare little watch: alter the delicate juxtaposition of cogs, and it just may not tick." -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

"For some reason, no one likes to be told that they do not read enough poetry…" -Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

Quotations
"'Going out – out beyond the dawn. Past the morning star. Used to think I'd be frightened. Not frightened. Funny. Think how much I'm going to know – in just a few more minutes, Emily. Wiser than anybody else living. Always wanted to know – to know. Never liked guesses. Done with curiosity – about life. Just curious now – about death. I'll know the truth, Emily – just a few more minutes and I'll know the – truth. No more guessing.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"'I don't want to die now!' he yelled.  'I've still got a headache!  I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross and wouldn't enjoy it!'" -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"'I'll never die,' the baroness said once to Archimboldi.  'Or I'll die at ninety-five, which is the same as never dying.'" -Roberto Bolaño (Translated by Natasha Wimmer), 2666

"When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die – and soon', then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first." -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"…Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
     I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
     To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,..." -John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"