Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

• Can't I even have the privacy of my own soul?
• How is it possible for me to be so miserable and embarrassed and humiliated and beaten and still function, still talk and smile and concentrate?
• I wouldn't intentionally hurt anyone in this whole world. I wouldn't hurt them physically or emotionally, how then can people so consistently do it to me?
• I guess I'll never measure up to anyone's expectations. I surely don't measure up to what I'd like to be.
• I want so much to be someone important.
• Personally I'd like to get a whole new everything, except my books of course, they are part of my life.
• Even now I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.
• It seems that when something is going good, everything else goes good too.
• I'm party somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other.
• As usual I can't afford a fraction of the things I want.
• It is a woman's place to be long-suffering and patient and toleratnt and understanding.
• Isn't that ghastly and ironic? I'm afraid to live and afraid to die.
• At this stage in my life nothingness is a lot better than somethingness.
• A man's blood soon runs cold when there is no one around to warm it up.
• The garbage that goes with drugs makes the price too goddamned high for anyone to pay.
• She didn't know whether she was running away from something or running to something, but she admitted that deep in her heart she wanted to go home.
• Perhaps it was even right for me to go through all this suffering so that I could be more understanding and tolerant of the rest of humanity.
• But I wonder if I will ever feel completely new again. Or will I spend the rest of my life feeling like a walking disease????
• My room will be my whole universe.
• People can adjust to anything.
• I have this very silly fear that one day I'll be old, without ever having really been young. Do you think life can get by you without your ever seeing it?
• Why is life so difficult? Why can't we just be ourselves and have everyone accept us the way we are?

12/14/2008

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

• People aren't meant to be overly bright in everything.
• There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.
• Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.
• There is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.
• The secret of a good lie is don't overly explain, and throw in one good detail.
• Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't.
• Every little thing wants to be loved.
• Nothing's fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now.
• Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.
• You can never underestimate the power of cutthroat competition.
• What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.
• Everybody needs a God who looks like them.
• Nobody should go through life without falling in love.
• The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
• It seemed to me it would have been better if God had deleted skin pigment altogether.
• You think too much. It would do you a world of good to stop thinking and just go with your feelings once in a blue moon.
• Enough was enough. You cannot fix the whole world.
• You can be bad at something, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.
• After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.
• Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.
• It's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.
• In life there are things you can't get over no matter how hard you try.
• There is nothing like a small joke at a vigil to help you relax.
• Death was nothing but a doorway.
• Life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.
• I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.
• I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world.
• When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.
• We can't think of changing our skin. Change the world--that's how we gotta think.
• You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.
• People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.
• Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.
• Once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.
• Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes.
• There is nothing perfect. There is only life.
• You can't talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you're not.
• It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
• Regrets don't help anything.
• Sometimes you just need to nurse something.
• If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.
• A person shouldn't look too far down her nose at absurdities.

8/11/2008

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

• Fear of new things is not an accurate measure of one's potential for growth.
• It doesn't matter what anybody looks like; what matters is what's going on on the inside.
• Love can do strange things to people.
• It's nice to have somebody be nice to you.
• Members of the royal family of Genovia do not "go home" when there is a crisis. No, they stay where they are and slug it out.
• You cannot quit being who you are.
• I would rather not have a boyfriend at all than have one who is only using me for my money or for any reason, really, except that he likes me for me, and nothing else.

7/26/2008

I Hate Other People's Kids by Adrianne Frost

• Old people have earned the right to be pissy.
• Kids should be cultured, sure, but only if they want to be cultured.

6/29/2008

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

• The person you were yesterday might not be the person you are tomorrow.
• High school students were cannibals; they fed off your broken heart while you watched and then shrugged and offered you a bloody, apologetic smile.
• Modern women had been driven so far from the home they no longer felt comfortable inside it.
• A guy can't hurt you if you don't let him.
• The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face.
• You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny; you were too busy trying to fit in.
• Power always involved a loss of humanity.
• The best relationships were the ones where both sides went out of their way to make sure the other wasn't disappointed.
• When you fooled around without the feelings attached, it might not mean anything...but then again, neither did you.
• When your significant other was missing, it wasn't the same bed. There was a void on the other side, a cosmic black hole, one that you couldn't roll too close to without falling into a chasm of memories.
• Random hookups weren't random, no matter what you told yourself.
• The only thing worse than not feeling anything was feeling everything.
• A word was a powerful thing. An insult didn't have to be shouted at you to make you bleed; a vow didn't have to be whispered to you to make you believe. Hold a thought in your head and that was enough to change the actions of anyone and anything that crossed your path.
• You couldn't have strenth without weakness; you couldn't have light without dark; you couldn't have love without loss.
• If you acted like you really wanted something even when you didn't, you just might convince yourself along with everyone else.
• How much had gone wrong between him and Laura. Maybe you had to scrape the bottom before you could push your way back to the surface.
• It was possible that everyone had two faces: Some of us just did a better job of hiding it than others.
• At any crossroads in life, half of us are destined to take a wrong turn.
• The problem with coming clean was that you thought you were clearing the slate, starting over, but it never quite worked that way. You didn't erase what you'd done. The stain would still be there.
• The best decisions in a marriage were based not on honesty but on the number of casualties that the truth might cause, versus the number saved by ignorance.
• Just because you didn't speak the facts out loud didn't erase their existence. Silence was just a quieter way to lie.
• Maybe it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.
• The person you were when you went to sleep at night might not necessarily be the person you were when you woke up.
• People's lives were as tightly woven as a piece of lace, and pulling on one string might furrow another.
• It wasn't what you didn't know about the people you loved that would shock you; it was what you didn't want to admit about yourself.
• Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to. And some people make the choice to let go.
• One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head...or maybe just your old ones, minus the hope.
• For every action, there was an opposite reaction. But maybe you could undo your wrongs by keeping someone else from making the same mistakes of misjudgment.
• You did what you had to, for the people you cared about.
• Was it tough love, putting your child through hell? Or was it the best of parenting, a way to make sure your child could survive without you?
• A thought might turn into an action at any moment; a word held in your mind had just as much power to wound or to heal as the one that was spoken aloud.
• If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.
• Sometimes what we wish for actually comes true. And sometimes that's the very worst thing that can happen.
• Just because you chose to leave a place did not mean you could escape taking it with you.

6/28/2008

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

• While I could easily feel sorry for myself, that wouldn't do them, or me, any good.
• All parents want to teach their children right from wrong, what we think is important, and how to deal with the challenges life will bring. We also want them to know some stories from our own lives, often as a way to teach them how to lead theirs.
• Engineering isn't about perfect solutions; it's about doing the best you can with limited resources.
• If you can dream it, you can do it.
• We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
• If you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable.
• Never make a decision until you have to.
• Just because you're in the driver's seat doesn't mean yo have to run people over.
• Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.
• You've got to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.
• When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you.
• I don't believe in the no-win scenario.
• Tenacity is a virtue, but it's not always crucial for everyone to observe how hard you work at something.
• The brick walls are there for a reason. They're not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
• It's easy to look smart when you're parroting smart people.
• Sometimes, the most impenetrable brick walls are made of flesh.
• Even fairy-tale moments have risks.
• Automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status.
• Not everything needs to be fixed.
• It's not helpful if we spend every day dreading tomorrow.
• Take a time out. It's not a real vacation if you're reading email or calling in for messages.
• Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.
• Everybody loves telling stories. It's one of the truly universal things about our species.
• Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.

6/4/2008

A Salty Piece of Land by Jimmy Buffett

• Everything leaves eventually in the physical form, but the memories of good people and good work are timeless.
• Life's adventures are the verses and choruses of your unique song, and when it is over, you are dead. Adventures don't come calling like unexpected cousins visiting from out of town. You have to go looking for them.
• Life is unpredictable, but there is a lot out there to do and see.
• There are no words to the song of the ocean, but the message is and always has been simple: not to forget where we came from. The melody is locked in the water that composes much of what we are. Most humans tend to ignore the song, but not all. You are one of the lucky ones who hold the melody in your heart. But be warned: it is a wandering song carried by the winds and the currents. It can turn you into a piece of driftwood that washes up on shore after shore, but one day, when you find the place that is meant to be, you will take root. Send me a postcard when you get there.
• Most people's jobs suck. You just need to find one that sucks less.
• Just don't panic, and it will be all right.
• I think darkness is the thing humans fear the most, for it takes away our advantage. In the dark, we have to rely on our instincts to survive, and as a species, those feelings haven't been around the track in a while.
• One man's cathedral is another man's fishing hole.
• Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.
• Contentment is a quality best suited for cows.
• We both had dreams, but my dreams were different than yours, and I had to chase them.
• I'm listening. How long will depend on your sincerity and honesty.
• I figured the best way to avoid trouble was to just disappear for a while.
• I think what connects some people to the art they like is not wishing they could paint it but rather wanting to be in the scene that the artist has painted.
• There are far more roads on which you may traverse life's paths than those that seem to have been preordained for you by others.
• There will always be those who feel more comfortable not venturing from the warmth of the hearth, but there are those who prefer to look out the window and wonder what is beyond the horizon.
• There is no beauty like that which overtakes us by accident.
• I have heard that even condemned prisoners in the foulest dungeons dress for dinner every now and then. They say it keeps them sane and human.
• Recordings are wonderful, but there is nothing like seeing a real performer work an audience live.
• If we're lucky, we can hang on to a piece of our childhood forever. The soft feel of a favorite blanket or teddy bear; the look on the face of your first puppy; the sound of the music played by the ice-cream truck. If we are lucky, these are the kinds of memories that keep us from growing old too fast.
• When you are on a mission, you must do what you have to do to succeed.
• Problems in paradise are just not as disconcerting as problems in a different climate or environment.
• A man has to be ready to go on a moment's notice, no matter how comfortable the moment might be.
• There is no reverse on the road of life, Tully. You just keep moving forward, and every now and then you try to catch a little neutral.
• It's all happening so fast. The world spins at one thousand miles an hour. This is nothing.
• You don't have to go looking for stories. The good ones will come to you.
• I think the reason the years seem to fly by is because they really do.
• Just goes to show you, money never does buy good taste.
• Hospital waiting is a strange state of existence. You're filled with your own concerns for you loved ones, but you are also suddenly part of a community of people who are dealing with the comings and goings from this world that our mortality presents.
• We are all survivors. But the trouble with being a survivor is that you find yourself dancing alone a lot. It is a tricky seesaw on which the survivor has to sit. On the one side is your ability to be comfortable in a world inhabited only by yourself. And on the other side is your desire to share your time with others. How do you balance? Being a survivor is not a bad thing, but you do run the risk of being the last one at the party when the punch bowl is empty and the confetti has turned to dust.
• Life is, and always has been, a struggle. The fishing pole bends heavier for some than others, and nobody has yet to figure out why--just as you never know, when you make a cast, if what attacks your fly is a finger-size baby snapper or a tiger shark that can turn you into bait. Still, we struggle with the rod just the same. Life to me is like a fish on the line. When it is there, you feel it. You fight it. You gain line. You lose line. But if that line suddenly snaps, or the pole breaks, or a thousand other problems occur that fishermen use as excuses when the tension is gone, you feel it even more.
• Grief is like the wake behind a boat. It starts out as a huge wave that follows close behind you and is big enough to swamp and drown you if you suddenly stop moving forward. But if you do keep moving, the big wake will eventually dissipate. And after a long enough time, the waters of your life get calm again, and that is when the memories of those who have left begin to shine as bright and as enduring as the stars above.
• The earlier in life we know we are part of something magical and mysterious, the better off we are.

6/1/2008

Chasing Down the Dawn by Jewel Kilcher

• These are the things which made me; these are the things I call home; these are the things that have filled my heart with song and I raise them now in homage.
• I've slept until 2 P. M. for the last three days. There is so much to dream about.
• It's all about love. There just needs to be more love.
• Of course my father swore he'd never be like his old man, but to break lifelong patterns requires a lot of focus, insight, and time to reflect and renounce old emotional habits. If you never stop and take the time, if you are too busy getting by to initiate change, change will be impossible--no matter how much you want things to be different.
• We were all doing what we needed to do to get by, hoping something better would come along.
• I want love to be simple. I want to trust without thinking. I want to be generous with my affection and patience and love unconditionally. It is easier to love a person with their flaws than to week through them. I want to love the whole person, not parts; and this is how I want to be loved.
• First love avoids conflict. Young lovers are quick to forgive and forget--perhaps because they love for love's sake...or maybe because they are somehow aware that they lack the skills necessary to address problems or change behaviors. First love is delicious and brutal. It is a bright fire that burns both hearts out. First love is all heart: new, raw emotions, with no rational structure on which to hang them. And it is often blind. First-time lovers cannot see condescension and jealousy for the inadequate defenses they are. They are somehow flattered by overbearing affection and jealous demands. Young love is a reckless adventure of abandon, a complete surrender to the fullness of emotion. And a young lover bathes in this recklessness like a child immersed in the warm, exotic pool of its first holiday.
• With time, my deepest cravings became impossible to ignore. Though I cared for him, I longed for my own destiny. In a single moment, I had give up the only future I had ever imagined, a future with him, and began to imagine a life of my own. I would begin to discover my passions and dreams.
• When I was young, I enjoyed seducing myself with the possibility of who a boy might be rather than who he actually was...avoiding real information. Gradually I became less interested in invention and more interested in intimacy.
• It says in the Bible that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children for seven generations.
• People are not irreparably damaged by their experience, that we do grow strong in areas where we were weakened.
• He was wounded, and acted out of his wounds.
• Necessity is the mother of all invention.
• It is enough to know I am in love and watch the sun rise through the black trees, not knowing what lies beyond each turn.
• She had postponed some of her immediate desires to invest in the future of her family.
• I started saving every dime I made, as if it was the last money that'd ever come my way.
• Sometimes even just a little bit merry is enough. You don't always have to feel the whole deal.
• I was blinded by my overconfidence. I was grown up and independent.
• Am I spending my time wisely? I only possess each second, each moment once, and if I am not conscious of each moment then I do not possess it at all. When I take the final inventory of my life, will this moment be vivid and significant or just another forgettable detail in a long dull dream?
• How I long to be more conscious, more aware, more alive, not wasting myself on things that take me farther from myself like hatred, fear, worry, and gossip, but constantly reinvesting my energy in the things that make me feel vital...like being still...
• They reminded me that we were all okay, just the way we were.
• There is a certain stability that comes from the understanding that the land will always take care of you, as long as you are healthy enough to work it.
• Being poor makes you aware of how terribly dependent you are on others to survive.
• There was a place in me that could never be broken. There was some place within me where I was always wise and untouchable and unbreakable.
• An obstacle was a creative opportunity in disguise, and with the right attitude and some creative thinking, we could turn it to our advantage.
• I began to feel that perhaps the unknown wasn't so scary after all. Maybe, I thought, life wasn't something that happened to me. Maybe, just maybe, it was something I created, like an intricate weaving, from the threads of my own perceptions.
• Did anyone feel normal? Did even the most stoned stoner or muscle-bound jock or prettiest, most popular girl feel normal? Probably not. Everyone was insecure, wanted to be told they were beautiful or talented, just like I did. I realized that when I compared myself to others I lost who I was. It felt so much better not to worry about looking cool or fitting in and to express myself instead.
• Stealing was a manifestation of my lack of faith in myself. If I really knew who I was, I wouldn't be so needy. I wouldn't have an empty space inside, or the inclination to fill that void with everything I could get my paws on. If I had faith and pride, I wouldn't covet what someone else had. I would recognize and take pride in the many gifts I'd been given. Stealing showed a direct lack of faith in God. After all, if I believed in God and that God took care of me, why would I steal?
• There is no grand design that limits what we can be or guarantees it coming.
• There is a nagging sense of fear in every woman, famous or not, who suspects that the world will forget her as soon as someone younger or more fantastic-looking comes along.
• When I visit schools and I see girls so anxious, trying so hard, I want to tell them that they are enough, just as they are.
• All I ever wanted to do was to create honestly.
• Now it's just a question of remembering what's inside me and acting on it, day by day. Some days are still more difficult than others.
• I had heard that if you fast in another person's name, it lends energy to them.
• I am a child. I still butcher delicate things with inexperience and good intentions.
• Lessons in anything have the potential to homogenize if the focus is on "correctness" rather than self-expression. Self-expression begins and ends with the soul.
• Life romances me often, I think to myself, though often I do not notice the rhythm or beauty or music that laces all of life with its common thread.
• It's about doing what you believe in.
• Hey, it's just another hash house on the road to success; show them no respect.

6/19/2005

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

• Nothing is ever certain.
• The truth was that the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
• A father's suspicion is as powerful as a mother's intuition.
• If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.
• You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
• Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
• Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end?

5/18/2005

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

• You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
• Art never comes from happiness.
• Growing strong and rich and smart was only the first half of your life story.
• Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
• The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don't know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress.
• Everything in moderation, dude. Even recovery.
• Torture is torture and humiliation is humiliation only when you choose to suffer.
• And it's funny how when somebody saves you, the first thing you want to do is save other people. All other people. Everybody.
• People really need somebody they feel superior to.
• It's okay to cry to cry as long as you're faking it.
• Someday I'd like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff.
• After long enough even the most generous people will stop sending a check.
• It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How if we can't explain something we'll just deny it.
• What does it get you if you can square root a triangle and then some terrorist shoots you in the head? It gets you nothing! This is the real education you need.
• I want you to know more than just what people think is safe to tell you.
• When you're thinking about the rest of your life, you're never really thinking more than a couple years down the road.
• It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than with the artwork itself.
• All of our making fun of things isn't making the world any better. We've spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own.
• Maybe there's worse things you can do that just letting somebody old die.
• All my life, I've been less my mother's child than her hostage.
• Everybody's trying to make every minute of the present last forever.
• Aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?
• Sex pretty much cures everything.
• Nothing is as good as you can imagine it.
• Sometimes a euphemism is more true than what it's supposed to hide.
• Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. People can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood.
• We live and we die and anything else is just delusion.
• Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.
• A fire alarm is never about a fire, not anymore.
• Nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.
• She must've saved my life, because I don't know who the hell she is.
• Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.
• I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
• The world won't end with a whimper or a bang, but with a discreet, tasteful announcement.
• This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster.
• In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure.
• Please, just show me one thing in this world that is what you'd think.
• I wish I had the courage not to fight and doubt everything. I wish just once, I could say, 'This. This is good enough. Just because I choose it.'
• You have to trade your youth for something.
• Those who can forget the past are way ahead of the rest of us.
• This is me trying to put things back the way they were before. Period revival. Me trying to reconstruct how my life worked until just a few weeks ago. How my dysfunction used to function so beautifully.
• The past, the future, life on other planets, everything is such an extension, such a projection of life as we know it.
• If you don't see somebody every day, you see them change.
• What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
• I'd rather people hate me than feel sorry for me.
• I could pretend that my life was more than just waiting for the next disaster.
• Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit. I am a rock. A jerk. I'm an uncaring asshole and proud of it.
• If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.
• It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and constructed. Even if it's for sure unexplainable. Even God.
• You wonder, what aren't they telling us?
• Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose.
• The answer is there is no answer.
• When you think about it, there's no good reason to do anything. There is no point.
• Why do I do anything? I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.
• Someday, everything we just did will look like small potatoes to you.
• I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything.
• There's no way you can get the past right. You can pretend. You can delude yourself, but you can't re-create what's over.
• Maybe knowing isn't the point.

8/20/2006

The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom

• Everyone has an idea of heaven, as do most religions, and they should all be respected.


• Scenery without solace is meaningless.


• There are no random acts. We are all connected. You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.


• Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.


• Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.


• No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.


• Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to.


• Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.


• Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.


• Sons will adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion. Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.


• All parents damange their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence.


• You have peace when you make it with yourself.


• Things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time affect you as well.


• Silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.


• Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.


• Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.


• Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all.


• Life has to end. Love doesn't.


• Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken.


• It is never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary.

2/16/2007

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• After greeting Rosemary and her mother he waited for them to speak first, as if to allow them the reassurance of their own voices in new surroundings.
• I haven't seen a paper lately but I suppose there's a war--there always is.
• New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
• Things ought to belong to the people that like them.
• Until you're eighteen nothing matters. And afterward it's the same way.
• He kissed her without enjoying it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth.
• So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That's an old-fashioned idea, isn't it?
• The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
• I suppose I got bored; and then it was such a long way to go back in order to get anywhere.
• I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.
• When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent--things get difficult.
• Nicole was sure that the money she spent was hers--Rosemary still thought her money was miraculously lent to her and she must consequently be very careful of it.
• There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything.
• He was himself a digest of what was within the book, that he could brief it five years from now, if it deserved to be briefed.
• The price of his intactness was incompleteness.
• Introspection is not good for a highly nervous state.
• Sometimes she speaks of 'the past' as people speak who have been in prison. But you never know whether they refer to the crime or the imprisonment or the whole experience.
• Soon you will be writing little books called 'Deep Thoughts for the Layman,' so simplified that they are positively guaranteed not to cause thinking.
• But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.
• People living alone get used to loneliness.
• I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
• Nicole knew about it but only darkly and tragically, hating him a little in an animal way, yet wanting to rub against his shoulder.
• "Wouldn't it be fun it--" it had been; and then, "Won't it be fun when--"
• When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was being refined down to a point.
• Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect--you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
• If I knew what I had done to deserve this I could accept it with equanimity.
• You mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
• It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want me to see.
• You can help yourself most.
• He thought about her with detachment, loving her for her best self.
• Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play."
• Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness.
• Her husband still shushed her when she grew violently naive.
• The best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.
• But some day I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
• But you never know how you once felt. Do you?
• I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.
• No friendship worth the name was ever destroyed in an hour without some painful flesh being torn.
• So easy to be loved--so hard to love.
• We get a lot of understanding at the end of life.
• Dick wrote a little with no particular method; it was one of those parts of life that is an awaiting.
• Either one learns politeness at home or the world teaches it to you with a whip and you may get hurt in the process.
• Abe educated her, and now she's married to a Buddha. If Europe ever goes Bolshevik she'll turn up as the bride of Stalin.
• In the fine spring morning the inhibitions of the male world disappeared and she reasoned as gaily as a flower, while the wind blew her hair until her head moved with it.
• Yet it was a man's world she had overheard.
• It's hard to go on liking people who don't like you.
• She had played planet to Dick's sun.
• Either you think--or else other have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
• I'm just a whole lot of different simple people.
• She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.
• It is hard for those who have once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well.
• When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.
• If you don't like nice people, try the ones who aren't nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.

6/11/2003

Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts

• Home is the place where your history begins.
• What was important to her was knowing that at the moment she took a picture, she was seeing something in a way nobody else ever had.
• Old women who teach Sunday School got just as much meanness in 'em as the rest of us.
• But with people, seems like love's a hard thing to know. It gets all mixed up. I mean, you can love one person in one way and another person in another way. But I think you'll know. I think if it's the right person, it'll be better than rain and hawks and wild plums. Even better than the moon. I think it'll be better than all that put together.
• Our lives can change with every breath we take. Let go of what's gone because men like Roger Briscoe never win. And tell them to hold on like hell to what they've got--each other, and a mother who would die for them.
• We've all got meanness in us. But we have some good in us, too. And the only thing worth living for is the good. That's why we've got to make sure we pass it on.
• What would be the fun of waking up every morning if you'd already done it all?
• Why does anyone lie? 'Cause we're scared or crazy, maybe just 'cause we're mean. I guess there's a million reasons to lie, but none like that. I guess there's always that one lie we never get over.

3/31/2003

Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding

• Why is it that the less you appear to want sex with men the more they do?
• But really it is all very well you yourself thinking things aren't right in a relationship, but if the other person starts doing it is like someone else criticizing your mother.
• Listen, Bridge, taking advice on dating from Jude and Shzzer is like taking advice from a diet consultant who weighs two hundred pounds.
• There's nothing a man finds more attractive than a woman who is in love with him.
• In darkness the stone becomes the buffalo. In sunlight all is as it is.
• He just didn't fancy me. Pretentious Jerome had committed a vicious, selfish, unforgivable, ego-destroying crime against all the laws of dating decency.
• Massive relief to be back in own home where am adult lord of castle instead of pawn in other people's games.
• They're all mouth and no trousers.
• The greatest thing you'll ever learn is how to love and be loved in return.
• Love is not something that happens to you but something you do.
• My sense of self comes not from other people but from myself.
• Human beings have capacity to change and grow.
• You see is amazing way that concentrating on work and career completely takes mind off romantic sadness.
• Love is never outside ourselves, love is within us.
• The danger is if you've been single for a time, you get so locked into a network of friends--this is particularly true of women--that it hardly leaves room for a man in their lives, emotionally as much as anything because their friends and their views are their first point of reference.
• A woman must know what she believes in, otherwise how can you believe in her yourself?
• He had lost all sense of himself and self-respect by begging her to come back, thereby undoing all his good dignified work of the last two months.
• When do not have sex life always feel sad when passing condom section as whole side of life that is denied to me.
• The secret of spiritual happiness is not doing the washing up in order to get the washing up done but to do the washing up. Is exactly the same with Christmas cards.

3/19/2003

Wifey by Judy Blume

• It's secrets that cause problems.
• Paying isn't caring.
• You can't wait around for your next life. This is your life. It's very short, very precious. Don't waste it.
• I'm not a lot of people.
• Oh, God, do we all turn into our parents in the end?
• Sometimes you have to talk about things even if they do hurt.

9/18/2005

Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

• You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.
• He was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was.
• Fighting ain't gonna get back nothing.
• Even a prince may be a fool.
• Parents were what they were; it wasn't up to you to try to puzzle them out.
• Life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.
• It would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.
• He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.
• Everybody gets scared sometimes. The smarter you are, the more things can scare you.
• Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them,not just something that makes you feel good giving it.
• Handle with care--everything--even the predators.
• You just have to stand up to your fear and not let it squeeze you white.

4/20/2007

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

• What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.
• Let's not have a funeral till we got somethin to bury.
• Some things in this world cant be helped.
• He'd the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not.
• People dont feel safe no more.
• If you're someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you'd be ill at ease. Should be anyways.
• If you dont like to be laughed at dont fall on your ass.
• I dont see how you can say somebody is just flat out the best.
• You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised.
• Ever dumb thing I ever done in my life there was a decision I made before that got me into it. It was never the dumb thing. It was always some choice I'd made before it.
• A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman. They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.
• You think you can believe in heaven if you dont believe in hell? I guess you can believe what you want to.
• You think God looks out for people? Yeah. I guess He does. You? Yeah. I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there's wars and ruination and all hell. You dont know what's goin to happen. I'd say He's just about got to. I dont believe we'd make it a day otherwise.
• Like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.
• No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.
• They have a long life, dreams. I have dreams now which I had as a young girl. They have an odd durability for something not quite real.
• Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten.
• The names of the entities that have power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity.
• In an ideal world the gossip of the idle would be of no consequence. But I have seen the consequences in the real world and they can be very grave indeed.
• There is no forgiveness. For women. A man may lose his honor and regain it again. But a woman cannot.
• What is sacred is sacred. The powers of the priest are more limited than people suppose.
• There is no greater monster than reason.
• You dont get to go back and pick some time when the trouble started and then lay everything off on your friend.
• I cant back up and start over. But I dont see the point in slobberin over it. And I cant see where it would make me feel better to be able to point a finger at somebody else.
• Some things aint reasonable.
• I dont believe in signing on just till it quits suitin you. You either stick or you quit.
• There aint but one truth. The truth is what happened. It aint what come out of somebody's mouth.
• I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
• He realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.
• All my life I had the feelin that trouble was close at hand. Not that I was about to get into it. Just that is was always there.
• Dying aint in people's plans, is it?
• Blood's blood. It dont know where it come from.
• I guess if I done anything real bad I'd rather not tell it.
• I wouldnt be here if I wasnt supposed to be here.
• You dont need to try and make it right. It is what it is.
• Corn grows by the will of God and beyond that will there is neither corn nor growing nor light nor air nor rain nor anything at all save only darkness.
• A man leaves much when he leaves his own country.
• What is done cannot be undone.
• The question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the face. Because otherwise we are nothing.
• For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on.
• Those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness.
• If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that cold not change. No matter what.
• All courage was a form of constancy. It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily. Courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it.
• So much depends on luck.
• His trust in the basic goodness of humankind became his undoing.
• In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.
• In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.
• If she does not come to value what is true above what is useful it will make little difference whether she lives at all.
• I've no sympathy with people to whom things happen. It may be that their luck is bad, but is that to count in their favor?
• I've known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred of phantoms and they were not happy people.
• If fate is the law then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility. It's in our nature.
• Scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.
• He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made on liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.
• He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
• It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
• The trouble with a liar is he cant remember what he said.
• Maybe the best thing to do might be just to go on and put it behind you. My daddy used to tell me not to chew on somethin that was eatin you.
• There's a purpose for everything in this world. Sometimes it might be hard to see what it is.

4/25/2007

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

• The first step to eternal life is you have to die.
• The feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die.
• On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.
• Everyone smiles with that invisible gun to their head.
• If I didn't say anything, people in a group assumed the worst.
• This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
• Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself. A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
• There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Now that she knows where we're all going, Marla feels every moment of her life.
• Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
• I just don't want to die without a few scars.
• Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.
• Sometimes you do something, and you get screwed. Sometimes it's the things you don't do, and you get screwed.
• What Marla loves, she says, is all the things that people love intensely and then dump an hour or a day after. The way a Christmas tree is the center of attention, then, after Christmas you see those dead Christmas trees with the tinsel still on them, dumped alongside the highway.
• Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.
• If I don't fall all the way, I can't be saved.
• If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom, you'll never really succeed.
• It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.
• Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice we would have nothing.
• In the wild you don't see old animals because as soon as they age, animals die. If they get sick or slow down, something stronger kills them. Animals aren't meant to get old.
• If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
• Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart.
• Maybe we should always assume the worst.
• The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back.
• Not everything is about money.
• Even if they don't kill you, if someone loves you enough to take you home, they still castrate you.
• In death we become heroes.
• That old saying, about how you always kill the thing you love, well, it works both ways.
• Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
• A moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection.
• We just are, and what happens just happens.
• Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.

8/6/2003

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

• Once you are in [a parallel universe] you can easily see the world you came from.
• When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber.
• When you're sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.
• We say that Columbus discovered America and Newton discovered gravity, as though America and gravity weren't there until Columbus and Newton got wind of them.
• Everything in the world is just the shadow of some real thing we can't see. And the real thing isn't like the shadow, it's a kind of essence-thing.
• YOU can't call a piece of fruit an apple when you want to eat it and a dandelion when you don't want to eat it. It's the same sort of fruit no matter what your intentions toward it.

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson

• She could stand anything, as long as she was in charge.
• Just 'cause someone isn't quite as smart as you are, don't give you no right to look down on them.
• A smart person oughta be able to think of a few regular words to stick in amongst the cusses.
• It ain't a shameful thing to need help.
• I can tell how old I am when I can't even understand the language of the young people about me.
• It was rather comfortable to know that your work was judged on its merits and was not affected by the teacher's personal opinion of the person doing the work. It was a little like throwing a basketball. If you aimed right, you got it through the hoop; it was absolutely just and absolutely impersonal.
• It makes me praise the Lord to see you so busy helping stead of hurting.
• What I can't see isn't likely to hurt me.
• Who am I to pass judgment on the Lord's anointed?
• Sometimes you gotta walk on your heel and favor your toe even if it makes your heel a little sore.
• The world is woefully short on frog smoochers.
• Once the tugboat takes you out to the ocean liner, you got to get all the way on board. Can't straddle both decks.
• It never pays to attach yourself to something that is likely to blow away.
• Life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough.
• All that stuff bout happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might now be happy, but either way, you ain't ready to die, are you? Sometimes in this world things come easy, and you tend to lean back and say, 'Well, finally, happy ending. This is the way things is supposed to be.' Like life owed you good things. And there is lots of good things. But you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain't what's regular--don't nobody owe 'em to you.

12/28/2006

Chocolat by Joanne Harris

• Old habits never die.
• It was too direct. He would have liked us to dance a little, to circle each other like wary cats.
• The Lord sees everything.
• People need time to adapt to change.
• Remember why we fast for Lent. Not for vanity. Not to impress our friends. Not so that we can fit into next summer's expensive fashions. Remember Our Lord. His sacrifice. His humility.
• The devil is a coward; he will not show his face. He is without substance, breaking into a million pieces that worm their evil ways into the blood, into the soul.
• A man of any age can choose his friends where he likes.
• The process of giving is without limits. Some people never have to think about giving.
• You don't get degrees in life, do you?
• It's quite true what they say about village communities. Everyone wants to know your business! I expect it comes of having so little entertainment.
• What's forbidden always tastes better anyway.
• Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know. What we fear.
• Well, everyone has an opinion. Even a priest is entitled to that.
• It isn't up to me--or anybody--to decide how these people should live their lives.
• If that stubbornness of hers could be turned out instead of in, what could she not achieve? I had no right to force her to any decision.
• You're never too old to have a good time!
• That was what came of interfering. So easy to inflict pain on others, on myself.
• He has to learn to do things his own way.
• Nobody needs to do anything.
• I'll know when the time really comes. I'll know.
• After a while you just have to stop. It's pointless. Hiding behind justifications, setting short-term goals to see out the week. After a while it's the lack of dignity that hurts more than anything else.
• Better to be patient.
• I never needed any doctor--or any priest--to tell me what to think.
• What I do in my house is my own business.
• I'd rather choke than get rid of my cats. Though there are some humans I could give up without a second thought.
• If it isn't one thing, then it's another. It's a fact of life.
• Did we spend all those years running from our loves, our friendships, the casual words uttered in passing that can alter the course of a lifetime?
• Weeds and wheat cannot grow peacefully together.
• A friend is a friend.
• But there are no certainties.
• People who know nothing of real magic imagine it to be a flamboyant process. And yet the real business is very undramatic; simply focusing of the mind toward a desired objective. There are no miracles, no sudden apparitions.
• I don't think there is such a thing as a good or bad Christian. Only good or bad people.
• You are entitled to your beliefs. As long as they make you happy.
• And what--if it isn't an impertinent question--what do you believe? Magic carpet rides, rune magic. Ali Baba and visions of the Holy Mother, astral travel and the future in the dregs of a glass of red wine...Buddha. Frodo's journey into Mordor. The transubstantiation of the sacrament. Dorothy and Toto. The Easter Bunny. Space aliens. The Thing in the closet. The Resurrection and the Life at the turn of a card...I've believed them all at one time or another. Or pretended to. Or pretended not to.
• I believe that being happy is the only important thing. Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. Bitter. Sweet. Alive.
• You can't just run away from it all.
• Start running away, and you'll be on the run forever. Stay and fight.
• You have to fight him face to face. Otherwise you may as well never have left him.
• Sometimes it's better to leave things as they are, to let grief take its course.
• There are too many sad thoughts in the air already.
• I'd like to be an adventurer. To follow the sun with nothing but a single suitcase, to have no idea at all of where I might be tomorrow. Believe me, you get tired. And after a while everywhere starts to look the same.
• Places all have their own characters, and returning to a city where you have lived before is like coming home to an old friend.
• The advantage of travel is that after a while you begin to realize that wherever you go, most people aren't really all that much different.
• If there were tears, the darkness hid them.
• I am not required to have an opinion. My role is to offer advice and comfort.
• We do not--interpret--God's laws to suit ourselves. Or the law of our country.
• Death should be a celebration, like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: Ahhhh!
• Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
• That's what old people do. They die. It's a fact of life. Happens all the time.
• At my age I can be anything I please. I can be absurd if I feel like it. I'm old enough to get away with anything.
• Physical pleasure is the crack into which the devil sends his roots.
• Fill those spaces with something worthwhile. Otherwise the weeds will always get in.
• As for God--I don't think that white collar gives you sole right of access to the divine.
• It won't ever be any easier than it is today.
• You can't put things back to what they were.
• Life's full of surprises.
• I would leaf through my collection of cookery cards, incanting the names of never-tasted dishes like mantras, like the secret formulae of eternal life.
• People always think the fun has to stop when you get old. Well, it doesn't.
• Evil lives with us. Evil wears a winning smile and bright colors.

1/4/2007

It's Not the End of the World by Judy Blume

• On TV everything always turns out all right.
• The one who asks the most questions learns the most.
• If you love someone, you learn to overlook the disgusting things.
• I wish somebody would talk to me and tell me it's going to be all right.
• Saying it would make it come true.
• There is something very wrong with an unloving parent. He deserves pity as well as anger.

12/26/2006

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

• There tha' stands sayin' tha' doesn't like this one an' tha' doesn't like that one. How does tha' like thysel'?
• There doesn't seem to be no need for no one to be contrary when there's flowers an' such like, an' such lots o' friendly wild things runnin' about makin' homes for themselves, or buildin' nests an' singin' an' whistlin', does there?
• Th' two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way--or always to have it.
• Th' world's full o' jackasses brayin' an' they never bray nowt but lies.
• One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts--just mere thoughts--are as powerful as electric batteries--as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.
• Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.

1/9/2006

Night by Elie Wiesel

• I wept because--because of something inside me that felt the need for tears. That was all I knew.
• Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?
• Every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
• Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him.
• Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers only within yourself!
• There are a thousand and one gates leading into the orchard of mystical truth. Every human being has his own gate. We must never make the mistake of wanting to enter the orchard by any gate but our own. To do this is dangerous for the one who enters and also for those who are already there.
• We must keep going.
• To save was our rule; to save up for tomorrow. Tomorrow might be worse.
• You must never lose faith, even when the sword hangs over your head.
• All creation bears witness to the Greatness of God!
• As soon as he felt the first cracks forming in his faith, he had lost his reason for struggling and had begun to die.
• You get used to anything.
• You died because you had to die. There was no fuss.
• Indifference deadened the spirit.
• Don't let yourself go under. You must resist. Don't lose faith in yourself.

1/1/2007

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

• Long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along.
• It not nice to speak ill of the dead, one say, but the truth never can be ill.
• The Lord don't like ugly. And he ain't stuck on pretty.
• Life don't stop just cause you leave home.
• Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
• All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did, I say. But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to think.
• There's a lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time.
• Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
• God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you looking for.
• I believe God is everything. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found It.
• I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
• Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me.
• Wherever there's a man, there's trouble.
• There's something in all of us that wants a medal for what we have done. That wants to be appreciated.
• All things look brighter because I have a loving soul to share them with.
• A burnt finger remember the fire.
• I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can't have.
• If a mule could tell folks how it's treated, it would.
• The only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother's children, no matter what they look like or how they act.
• Everybody learn something in life.
• I couldn't understand why us have life at all if all it can do most times is make us feel bad.
• I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love. And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.

12/20/2006

The Funny Thing Is...by Ellen Degeneres

• Be nice to everyone, even though you don't want to and you may not like certain people. Be kind, friendly, and respectful even if people are not nice to you. That way, you're not dragged down to their level. Also, there's nothing that annoys arrogant jerks more than people being nice to them.
• Try to have some quiet time every day.
• Try to put time aside to listen to "you". It's easy to forget what "you" want, who "you" are, with all the noise. Check in with "you" every day.
• There's never a need to overdo anything.
• Know you are special.
• The key to life is balance. Think of a seesaw. On one side is Give, the other side Take. If you just give and give and give, you've got nothing left. You're empty.
• Start thinking positively. You will notice a difference.
• Stop being wishy-washy about things!
• Work, but have playtime. Recess.
• There's no reason to live a life of regret.
• The saying "It's the thought that counts" was coined as an emotional Band-Aid by someone who left all of her shopping until nine o'clock Christmas Eve. If it's really the thought that counts, then why don't we ever tell people what we were thinking when we were scrambling to buy them their last-minute panic gift?
• Since we can't, as adults, get away with throwing bad presents against a wall and bursting into tears, Christmas is the time of year when we all become really good at lying.
• Silence is where all of our answers are. It's where our truth is.
• Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
• You'd think with all these innovations that are speeding things up for us and moving us along, people would be early--or at least on time--when they're going places. But somehow, everybody's still always late.
• As long as people don't harm anything or anyone, they have the right to hate anything, but really, it's a shame to waste that kind of energy on hate. It's such a negative and draining emotion. Also, you're shutting yourself out of a possible opportunity to grow in some new area, to try to understand something that up until now you haven't understood.
• Adversity builds character. Translation: You become bitter and angry and then people hate you even more.
• Is the easier way always the better way for me?
• Don't care too much about what other people think, or you'll never do anything.
• There are a lot of self-righteous people out there. And if you try to adjust your life to please them, you're just going to go crazy and risk being as unhappy as these self-righteous kooks are.

2/18/2006

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

• Ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
• Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.
• I wasn't gonna stay no place where I couldn't get nowhere or make something of myself.
• If I was alone I could live so easy.

12/31/2006

Ya-Yas in Bloom by Rebecca Wells

• There is pain in my life, but it is harder to put a name to it.
• Just think pretty pink and blue thoughts.
• Magical creatures, or at least some kind of energies, are coming from flowers and plants and trees, and protecting us from ourselves. Protecting us from the demons inside that want to eat us alive.
• God sent us here to love Him and worship Him and venerate the mother of his Blessed Son. He is a generous God who does not expect perfection, but does expect reverence.
• You learn so much about a person when they get things wrong!
• I eat enough dead animals. I don't want to wear them.
• None of the prayers he had been taught seemed to apply to his situation. They were just words.
• He had always known that at any time he could walk straight into The Twilight Zone.
• The right way to pray is not to beg, but to picture good things, to banish all bad things from your mind. To put up a huge wall of prayer so no bad thoughts can get in. To see what you want, and to feel the love that has been hiding there, only you were too bossy to feel it before.
• You can't let fear of hurricanes stop you from putting seeds in the ground, even if they're going to grow tall only to be destroyed.
• We must not confuse statues with God the Father or God the Son.
• I do the best I can. Which of course is never enough.
• Give up? No, you've got to keep going.
• What if God didn't intend for everything to be perfect? What if He knew it was going to be a holy mess, and he loved us anyway?
• Bloodletting takes place in the best of families.
• I can figure out what's a sin and what's not.
• Sometimes we have to wait and put our dreams on hold for a while. We don't get to have them right away. We make little payments on them, and we wait. Later, it is even better than if you got it all at once!
• There is being a fan, and then there is being a nut.
• It's time to see something different. Stop being sheep led to the slaughter.
• Steal, lie, and cheat--but don't ever try to be something you aren't.
• Sometimes the will of God is hard to understand. Sometimes the good die young while the wicked prosper.
• Holiness could beget prosperity if you were right with Jesus.
• Dark things can happen on even the sunniest day.
• Once a baby comes into your life, everything changes, and you lose control, lose your flat stomach and your fine five-year career plan.
• When God closes a door, he opens a window.
• She felt if she stayed in motion, things would somehow be okay.
• With forgiveness came peace.
• There are mysteries in this world I will never understand.
• When she got most panicked, she would picture falling back into a great big pair of loving arms that held her. You lean back into these loving arms and they hold you up and nothing bad can happen.
• When I'm doing my job, it takes my mind off the worst.
• You can't blink anymore. Not these days. Not if you want your children to remain safe.
• Our children are growing up in a different world. You want to protect them, then get with the program.
• It's hard to keep everything in its place, isn't it?

1/12/2007

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

• Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations.
• Expect everything and the unexpected never happens.
• It is our most valuable possession, more precious than diamonds. It marches on, it and tide wait for no man.
• I realized that I'd never amount to anything without an education.
• You can get in a lot of trouble mixing up words.
• An ill-chosen word is the fool's messenger.
• Silence is golden.
• Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things.
• On many occasions, where you're going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone.
• There's a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.
• I'm going to have a very good reason before I make up my mind about anything. You can lose too much time jumping to Conclusions.
• Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them has to be right.
• Just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for.
• Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.
• There's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing.
• You must never feel badly about making mistakes as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.
• It's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.
• Whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way.
• What you learn today will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.
• What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.
• So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

12/24/2006

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

• In pardoning we are pardoned.
• You have opened a door, and because you have opened it, we must go through.
• God forgives us, who am I not to forgive?
• It is strange how we move forward in some things, and stand still in others, and go backward in yet others.
• They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.
• While there is life, there is hope for amendment of life.
• If one could only have been told, this step is taken, and this step is about to be taken.
• Sorrow is better than fear. For fear impoverishes always, while sorrow may enrich.
• Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.
• When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.
• No one can comprehend the ways of God.
• Do not pray to understand the ways of God. For they are secret. Who knows what life is, for life is a secret.
• Give thanks where you can give thanks. For nothing is better.
• We do what is in us, and why it is in us, that is also a secret. It is Christ in us, crying that men may be succoured and forgiven, even when He Himself is forsaken.
• I desire nothing that is not here.
• His life was his own, and no other man had a right to put his hands on it.
• It's more important to speak the truth than to make money.
• Nothing is too much trouble.
• It is not permissible to keep men unskilled for the sake of unskilled work.
• It is not permissible to add to one's possessions if these things can only be done at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation.
• The truth is that our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of high assurance and desperate anxiety, or loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.
• It takes all kinds to make a world.
• Money is not something to go made about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born.
• I am moved by something that is not my own, that moves me to do what is right, at whatever cost it may be.
• It is a man's freedom to sell his labour for what it is worth.
• Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.
• If the law is the law of a society that some feel to be unjust, it is the law and the society that must be changed.
• Who can stop the heart from breaking?
• The men who do the work cannot be kept down for ever. If they will stand together who will stand against them?
• I hate no man. I hate only injustice.
• Power corrupts. A man who fights for justice must himself be cleansed and purified. Love is greater than force.
• Kindness and love can pay for pan and suffering. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to tech us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
• There is not even good farming without the truth.
• We do not work for men. We work for the land and the people. We do not even work for money.
• Hate no man, and desire power over no man.
• There is enough hating in our land already.
• Perhaps the darkness gives courage.

3/10/2007

What Hearts by Bruce Brooks

• Now his life had a past, a past that would not get any bigger, that would always be shrinking but would never disappear.
• There were alternatives. A feeling, an object, a person could seem like one thing but be another; an action could seem as if it were taking one turn, but veer off another way. Anything could happen at any time. He was not on tracks.
• He had the chance to create himself in the eyes of the strangers.
• From insight to love was not a big step.
• He placed himself in the world, and the world drew his thoughts outside himself, where they multiplied and spiraled and led him in silent, thrilling flights. And as he expanded into the world, he expanded inside. At these moments an endlessness beyond thought opened inside him. Outside, his mind was whizzing through things, but inside, he was silent, still; sometimes, he knew he was not even breathing.
• These abilities and experiences must appear, somehow, in everything he did, in what he was; but how could anyone be expected to know what he was? He was alone.
• There simply was a right way to do it, and when there was a right way, it should be done.
• It was impossible to fox someone who had no strategy.
• Talent and technique could not create power.
• How could we all know what is about to happen?
• Preference was not knowledge.
• He did not understand giving up. Giving up did not work.
• Nothing in his behavior could be taken as a sign of the deepness inside him.
• The love of a boy could change a girl into a woman.
• For a long time it's been enough just to feel things. Now all of a sudden I want to get it out.
• You want to share something you've made. You put all this work into making something and naturally you want to show it off. It's human nature.
• When we love someone it is because we built that feeling, bit by bit. It's a choice. It's what we make only for ourselves.
• When a girl knows a boy loves her, that--more than anything that can happen to her, until she has a child--gives her happiness. It has nothing to do with her feelings for him. It's a gift, that's all. And when you get a gift, you feel good. Doesn't matter if you haven't got a gift ready to give in return. Something as fine as love from someone, knowing about it means a lot. It can mean everything.
• Trouble doesn't just come from feeling bad when things are going fine. Trouble can also come from feeling good when you shouldn't.
• You have to meet the world halfway.
• If the heart could betray one's good sense--if love could take such liberties as to fasten onto stepfathers--then what hope was there for a boy of intelligence and will? What justice?
• Grace is give, not always received.
• There was a good thing about words: they could rise away from circumstances, they could take their meaning with them, they could move right along with you.

4/13/2007

Riding in Cars with Boys by Beverly Donofrio

• I developed a talent for pure concentration, which enabled me to hear absolutely nothing when I was reading or writing.
• Why when you talk about making love do you always say sex? Do you make no distinction?
• How can you stand to have that television on nonstop? It's like mental Novocain.
• Once you leave, you're not coming back.
• His suggestion that I rely on a man to help us out, irritated me no end.
• Crossroads--where if he took a left he'd really be running away, but if he took a right he'd be nearly home.
• He hadn't been thinking of me at all. Just as I hadn't been thinking of him.
• I didn't see the meridian separating the incoming from the outgoing traffic and sailed right over it.
• There's a big design, that the end is already there in the beginning and there's nothing we can do about it, not in a lifetime. Nothing we can do about the events, but plenty we can do with them. It all comes down to the way we look at things.
• Then I thought of Olivia and how her feet had hobbled her life. No. She had hobbled her life with her belief about her feet.
• You're just handed some things in life that you have no control over, so you'd better learn from them rather than letting them get to you.
• John Lennon died, the end of youth and the demise of innocence.
• He hadn't been spying, just concerned.
• Another skip in the record.
• We hated each other for a couple of days, then eventually started acting like nothing had happened, which was one of our routines.

1/25/2003

The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard

• Her impairment was a deliberate choice, not a temporary fog that could have burned off when she felt equal to seeing things clearly.
• Everything that matters in life is decided irrevocably in seconds.
• Everybody has somebody.
• She tended to embrace panic as a matter of course: no hangnail was too small for a short fulmination.
• You give something, you get something.
• It's faith that really takes the courage. The belief in things unseen.
• Maybe you don't have to believe everything. Maybe you don't have to know how to pray. Maybe you have all you can do right now just to hold on. Maybe holding on is enough.
• She had to play the hand she was dealt.
• I don't think I can go back and start up life as if none of this ever happened.
• It's the worst. But it doesn't mean you should throw away everything else with both hands.
• Was true madness simply a will so ultra-strong it overcame ordinary human response? Or were such people really wandering so deep inside, on a broken landscape, so intent on minding their own footing, that the world outside receded?
• Nothing in the world can ever be as bad as what she's going through, so she's just opted out of life completely.
• There is no suck thing as having a normal life again.
• The only true opera is Italian.
• Adults aren't supposed to say that stuff where kids can hear them.
• People have been fools for lesser things.
• She'd swallowed so many unspeakables that one day they would probably rise up and choke her.
• Give me a lever and a place to stand and I can move the world.
• Adults had this idea of you and what you knew and the limits of it, and they got real hostile if you got outside it--they said you were showing off or being an asshole or whatever.
• No matter how severe the grief we had to endure was, we needed to keep priorities straight, we need to be strong, and try to accept responsibility, because the world wasn't going to cut you slack, you had to make the grade, and you know you have the ability.
• Have you ever heard of the big purple elephant in the living room? There's this elephant right in the middle of the living room, and the whole family walks around it and pretends it isn't there...You've got to think about it. It's right in front of you.
• You don't get to be ready for it.
• How can you have feelings about something you didn't even know was going on?
• I want to know that I flourished in my youth.
• Shrinks had to be crazy themselves.
• How could you be mad at a crazy lady for something she didn't even know was wrong?
• No matter how smart you were, when it came to how you felt about things, you were pretty much always last to know.
• They were all strangers brought together to act in a play without rehearsal.
• I fully expect people to try to protect their children.
• I think that all the bad things in the world, including wars and religion, and all the good things in the world, including Shakespeare and country music, come from love. That's what I think. But I also think there'd be electric cars and a cure for AIDS and I don't know what else if people didn't have to crack up over love about six times a lifetime or feel like they were missing out on something.
• Doesn't pay to be nosy just for the sake of it.
• People don't know what they don't know.
• Don't half the people in the world marry people they're not exactly madly in love with because they want security, or children, or whatever?
• You should know better than to believe everything you think you see.
• There could be worse things than being dead.
• A kid's personality showed in his walk.
• Don't go prospecting for grief.
• But I can never cry when I need to. Or faint when I need to. Or sleep when I need to.
• Reese tried to slow down the thrum of his hear that interfered with his hearing. His heart rebelled, pummeling harder.
• All children experienced to some degree the phenomenon of erased recollection. It was one of the most difficult crossroads between parents and children: adults could remember the enraptured tenderness of the early bond; children, whose job was to fracture that bond, couldn't.
• Not remembering was the same as not knowing.
• Don't bolt the door behind you is all. Close it partway if you have to, but don't lock it.
• Fear is not in my vocabulary.
• You had to keep walking until you figured out what was the right place, keep on searching until somebody found you.

2/7/2007

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

• People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.
• Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them on day being dead and in the ground.
• People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone.
• That was the definition of our faith. Nothing was to be known. Anything was to be expected.
• You can't keep the whole Bible balanced in your head. You wouldn't have room to remember your name.
• Everything in your life turns into an item on a list. Something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out.
• Nobody teaches you all the job skills you need in Home Economics, but over enough time, you pick them up.
• Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.
• I just want some proof that death isn't the end.
• You get just enough to make ends meet.
• In some other program RELEASED used to mean a client was set free. Now it means a client is dead. Nobody wanted to special-order a stamp that said DEAD.
• These people will do anything to make me look incompetent.
• You could call me a gentleman's gentleman but you'd be wrong on both counts.
• Matthew, Chapter Twenty-four, Verse Thirteen: "But he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved."
• I Corinthians, Chapter Six, Verse Eighteen: "Flee fornication...he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body."
• It's okay. It's a sexual release, she tells me. It's perfectly natural. You find what you want. You stalk it. You grab it and make it your own. After you've had it, you throw it away.
• Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In the world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules.
• I can't hold your hand forever. If you're going to kill yourself, I can't stop you, and it's not my fault.
• If you were fat you ate to lose weight, and if you were too skinny you just ate.
• Artificial men and women are posed in the windows wearing clothes. Smiling. Laughing. Pretending to have a good time. I know just how they feel.
• The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing.
• The sun's outside the bathroom window trying to show us we're all being stupid. All you have to do is look around.
• What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too.
• The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved?
• You realize that if no one's watching, you might as well stay home.
• You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can't give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they're terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it's all because we're afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt.
• Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.
• People are looking for that, a hand to hold. Reassurance. The promise that everything will be all right.
• Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix. Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.
• What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
• Disaster movies have everybody expecting too much from nature.
• We all hear the same things on the radio, we all repeat the same talk to each other. There are no surprises left. There's just more of the same. Reruns.
• We remember almost none of our real childhoods, but we remember everything that happened to sitcom families.
• People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves.
• It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized.
• No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing.
• Long-term we're all going to die. Then our bodies will rot. No surprise there. Short-term, we're going to live happily ever after.
• You don't have to control everything. You can't control everything
• If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get.
• Even the garden of Eden was just a big fancy cage. You'll be a slave the rest of your life unless you bit the apple.
• Sex is the act that separates us from our parents.

11/25/2003