Do something better and different that people know you by your work not by your name.

— Jarman Sandhu

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

— Richard Yates

Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were.

— David Levithan

Empathy is the ability to step outside your own bubble and into the bubbles of other people. Empathy is the ability that allows us to be useful creatures on this planet; without empathy, we are a waste of oxygen in this world. Without empathy, we are lower than animals. Empathy is the ability that allows us the perception of things around us, outside ourselves; so a person without empathy is a limited human being, someone who will only live half of a life.

— C. JoyBell C.

Everything seemed so unreal—so supernatural—and I had to remind myself that it was. We weren’t human. We never were. (Jessica)

— Shannon A. Thompson

HOME, which is the last floor for everyone.

— Sushil Singh

How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gilding: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Human life is a voyage on a sea of meaning, not a net of information.

— Gregory Benford

I believe in the ability to choose. I believe this life is made up of our choices and their consequences— the good and the bad. Furthermore, I do not believe in letting anything up to fate. We are the makers of our own destinies, our own futures, our own paths. To blindly follow is an insult to the miracle of being human. To be human is to make choices; the moment you allow others to make decisions for you is the moment you do an injustice to not only mankind but to yourself.

— Kelseyleigh Reber

I do not believe any person is born knowing how to be human. Everyone has to learn their letters and everyone has to learn how to be alive. . . . Maybe it's not a lesson so much as it's a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that's left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you're lucky. If that's what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what's said to you, doing what's done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you're all alone, you keep on cawing __hello, pretty bird__ at the dark.

— Catherynne M. Valente