Through my  reading, I have come across a number of quotes and paragraphs that were either enjoyable reading or were meaningful. These will increase with further reading.  Keep coming back for more...

• "We lie more to our loved ones, because we care about them so damn much.  Why do you think we tell the truth to priests and shrinks and total strangers we meet on trains?  It's because we don't love them, so we don't care what they think." - Code to Zero, Ken Follet

• "Yet one thing he was certain about now:  between love and peace of mind he would choose the latter." - Waiting, Ha Jin

• "Why do people have to live like animals, eating and reproducing, possessed by the instinct for survival?  What point is there in having a dozen sons if your own life is miserable and senseless?   Porbably people are afraid, afraid of disapperaing from this world--traceless and completely forgotten, so they have children to leave reminders of themselves." - Waiting

• "Life is such a precarious thing.   Today we're alive, tomorrow we may be gone.  What's the point in trying so hard to live like a human everyday." - Waiting

• "A day for a world without deformityor threat of damage, and my pleasure in the weather was all the greater becayse it held its own beauty and was engaged with nothing but itself." - Dangling Man, Saul Bellow

• "When I neglect to look carefully at the newspaper I do not know what day it is.  If I guess Friday and then learn that is is actually Thursday, I do not experience any great pleasure in having won twenty-four hours." - Dangling Man

• "...our only freedom is choosing between bitterness and plesaure.  Since the insignificance if all things is our lot, we should not bear it a an affliction but learn how to enjoy it." - Identity, Milan Kundera

• "You can't measure the mutual affection of two human being by the number of words they exchange." - Identity

• "If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will very discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them.  The second categor, discreet and tactful, those are your friends.  'Friends' in the modern sense of the term." - Identity

• "Friendship is indispensible to man for the proper function of his memory.  Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self.  To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.  They are our mirrorl our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it." - Identity

• "We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it. " - Identity

• "There is no point in asking a man a question until you have established whether he has any reason to lie to you." - Lie Down with Lions, Ken Follet

• "Droll thing life is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.  The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets.." - Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

• "...because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...." - Heart of Darkess

• "Imagining something is better than remembering something." - The World According to Garp, John Irving

• "...who without friction of some kind would probably have lost his senses and his grip upon the world.." - Garp ...

• "...since the past exists only to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred." - Midnight's Chidren, Salman Rushdie

• "...able to bathe in the blesed oblivion of other people's lives." - Midnight;s Children, Salman Rushdie

• "When though becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy." - Midnight's Chidren, Salman Rushdie

• "Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence." - Midnight;s Children, Salman Rushdie

• "An overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for the flight into the safety of dreams. - Midnight's Chidren, Salman Rushdie

• "Nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.." - Midnight;s Children, Salman Rushdie

• "But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned disvcoveries.  We aretop-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see." - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving

• "Not simple intolerance, but olerance of intolerance, which allows the intolerance to exist." - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving

• "It seems idiotic, but I think it's fairly common that we meet people of importance to us just before we are going away somewhere." - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving

• "Imagination can select more plausible details than those incredible-but-true details that we remember." - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving

• "People actually learn very little about themselves; it's as if they realy appreciate the continuous act of making themselves vulnerable." - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, John Irving

• "I'm not that special," he said with genuine embarrasment.  "I just come from a world you've never seen." - Night to Remeber, Ken Follet

• "He once heard a joke about a man who jumped out of a tenth floor window, and falling past the fifth floor was heard to say:   'So far, so good.'" - Night to Remember

• "I think we should learn from our experiences but learn from our ideals." - Night to Remember

• "The speed of the river hardly alters in hundreds of years, unmoved by the increasingly frenetic pace of life all around it." - The Big Needle, Ken Follet

• "Everything that matters in our lives takes place in our absence." - The Vegetable, F.Scott Fitzgerald

• "A man who has no fear can do anything he wants." - The Man From St. Petersburg, Ken Follet

• "In his saner moments, he realized he was half mad." - The Man From St. Petersburg

• "...for one could only be afraid on account of something for which one cared." - The Man From St. Petersburg

• "The things that they had to say were so many and so weighty that they sat in silence." - The Man From St. Petersburg

• "The relation of love is not the same as the relation of worship.  One worships a God.  Only human beings can be loved.  When we worship a woman we cannot love her.  Then, when we discover she is not a God, we hate her.  This is sad." - The Man From St. Petersburg

• "Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily.  But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad making.  And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way." - Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger

• "...it was the stare , not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that." - Franny...

• "As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see,between the man who's greedy for material treasure--or even intellectual treasure--and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure." - Franny...

• "To him, money was like the toy bank notes in Monopoly:  he wanted it, not for what it could buy, but because it was needed to play the game." - Paper Money, Ken Follet

• "Fate has been not merely unjust but positively vindictive." - Paper Money

• "I mean how do you know what you're going to do until you do it." - Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

• "That's the whole trouble.  You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any." - Catcher...

• "... but I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another for some highly unworthy cause." - Catcher...

• "I think that one of these days, you're going to have to find out where you want to go.  And then you've got to start going there." - Catcher...

• "The man falling isn't permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom.  He just keeps falling and falling.  The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives , were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with.  Or they thought their own environment couldn't supply them with.  So they gave up looking.  They gave up before they ever really even got started." - Catcher...

• "It was easy to manipulate people if you understood the psychology of the human being.  You had to study the people, comprehend their situations, and figure out their needs." - On Wings of Eagles, Ken Follet

• "... when you want to enjoy something, you must never let logic get too much in the way." - SeinLanguage, Jerry Seinfeld

• "The sun rises, and the sun sets.  Sometimes it rains.  We live, then we die."  He shrugged. - The Key to Rebecca, Ken Follet

• "I began to realize how simple life would be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do." - Rebecca

• "It's lovely to know the world can't interfere with the inside of your head." -  Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt

• "... because it tells you everything about everything and that's all I want to know." - Angela's Ashes

• "If you commit one sin you might as well commit a few more because you get the same sentence in hell.  One sin, eternity.  A dozen sins, eternity." - Angela's Ashes

• "There is, as has been widely observed, no such thing as a foolproof system.  Sooner or later a big enough fool will always come along." - Economist, October 17, 1998

• "It moves us, it guides us.  Passion rules us all.  Is there any other way." - Angel, BTVS

• "We grasp in desperation at the turn of the new millenium, hoping it may prove some sort of catalyst for communication, that by magnifying its significance we may actually reflect on where we are collectively heading." - Wipe NYC

• "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." - Wipe NYC

• "An elephant's only big when it's next to something else..." - Teddy, by J.D. Salinger

• "I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow [my body] but the knowledge is still there, because--obviously--I've used it ... It would take a lot of meditation and emptying out to get the whole thing back--I mean the conscious knowledge--but you could do it if you wanted to." - Teddy, by J.D. Salinger

• "Inside my heart is breaking, but my smile still stays on... I have to find the will to carry on" - The Show Must Go On

Forward all questions, comments, or suggestions to me, avnish@avnish.com