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

One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

• They knew everything about what was going on in their little world.
• I listened to her, because I loved her.
• I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and everyday any longer.
• If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
• She should never be disappointed by failure because failure was all you could expect.
• The important thing is that I'm all right.
• I'd read for hours. I think in the back of my mind I thought it would be a substitute for not going to college.
• It's a mistake to base your entire life on one man's approval.
• I don't have the energy for anger.
• I'm the kind of person who likes to know things.
• It's the weak link in just about every book I've ever read. They set up a very smart, very thoughtful, very nice character, and then have him fall in love with someone that anyone could tell is a horrible human being.
• She was not yet ready to let her child be the grown-up in the house. She had had one great calling, as a mother, and she would not be forced from the field.
• There's no such thing as being too hard on yourself.
• Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you, God, for everything.
• Everyone deals with bad stuff in their own way.
• Why should she have to sit by herself and look at pictures of her life when she could have the real thing? Why should she sit around conjuring up her memories of your life together when she could be with you making real memories?
• Sometimes people need to hear things said out loud before they become real.
• I have the right to be treated as a living human being until I die.
• We cry to give voice to our pain.
• I refuse to believe that keeping your grief bottled up makes you feel better than crying.
• It's more important that you take advantage of the time you have than that you worry about how much time there is.
• There is no good way to tell people that they are lucky in their relationships.
• You make concessions when you're married a long time that you don't believe you'll ever make when you're beginning. You say to yourself when you're young, oh, I wouldn't tolerate this or that or the other thing, you say love is the most important thing in the world and there's only one kind of love and it makes you feel different than you feel the rest of the time, like you're all lit up. But time goes by and you've slept together a thousand nights and smelled like spit up when babies are sick and seen your body droop and get soft. And some nights you say to yourself, it's not enough, I won't put up with another minute. And then the next morning you wake up and the kitchen smells like coffee and the children have their hair all brushed and the birds are eating out of the feeder and you look at your husband and he's not the person you used to think he was but he's your life. The house and the children and so much of what you do is built around him and your life, too, your history. If you take him out it's like cutting his face out of all pictures, there's a big hole and it's ugly. It would ruin everything. It's more than love, it's more important than love.
• You can be hard, and you can be judgmental, and with those two things alone you can make a mess of your life the likes of which you won't believe.
• All the things we don't say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble. I want to talk before I die. I want to be the one who gets to say things, who gets to think the deep thoughts.
• It's so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you're missing, or what you imagine you're missing. It's so much more peaceful.
• There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
• A good housewife makes a happy home.
• Second-rate poetry is better than no poetry at all.
• Knowing that you're typical doesn't go a long way toward making you feel better in your day-to-day life.
• It takes your entire life to get over some of the people you've loved, and some you never get over.
• If your cat is up a tree, then you want to be nice to police officers. If you are under suspicion in a murder case, you do not. They are on the other side. They are not interested in the search for truth. They are interested in the search for you.
• Everyone makes up their little stories and then they wonder why their own lives aren't like that. It makes life so much simpler if they can get rid of all the loose ends.
• I just want to feel something.
• Wasn't your image of your father always just refracted through your mother's belief in what he was? Wasn't he really just her creation?
• Be just, and fear not.
• Authority must earn the right to lead, and we owe ourselves the right to refuse to follow if they do not.
• It's so much easier to know just how you feel about things, what you believe, when you're writing it on paper than when you really have to do anything about it or live with it.
• It's all anyone wants, really, to make life simple.
• Death is so strange, so mysterious, so sad, that we want to blame someone for it.
• I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
• Have you ever had the feeling that you had things all figured out and then suddenly you find yourself back to square one?

2/15/2007

Family--The Ties That Bind...And Gag! by Erma Bombeck

• After the land of make-believe came reality, and people who lived there didn't seem to have a whole lot of fun.
• The man who held your hand tenderly through sixteen hours of labor with your first child could charge you $135,000 for landing on Park Place without a trace of remorse.
• I promise by all that is holy, I will never observe another Christmas without meaning.
• Friends are "annuals" that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a "perennial" that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.
• If a home is a man's castle...let him clean it.
• There are two things a woman should do by herself...give birth and shop.
• We have an entire generation of kids growing up who have been told that work must be "fun, relevant, and meaningful." The hell it is. It's discipline, competition, and repetition.
• I learned that he may love several wives, embrace several cars, be true to more than one political philosophy, and be equally committed to several careers, but he will have only one comfortable chair in his life. I learned it will be an ugly chair. It will match nothing in the entire house. It will never wear out.

3/2/2006

Forever... by Judy Blume

• You can't excel at everything. I'm realistic about myself. I think a person has to be.
• People who come from happy homes, with parents who really care about each other tend to have good marriages themselves.
• You can't have a decent relationship without honesty.
• Can you really love someone you've seen just nineteen times in your life?
• Spending a lot of time together can end a romance faster than anything else.
• The future will take care of itself.
• You have to be sure you can handle the situation before you jump into it.
• Reading and doing are not the same at all.
• We grow from our experiences.

12/25/2006

The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield

• True intelligence does not reside in the brain, but in the hands.
• In the final analysis, aren't all our diseases mental?
• You could change the universe, or your own at any rate, by transmuting it mentally.
• When a man's foes are worthy, every match is at championship level.
• I believe that each of us possesses, inside ourselves, one true Authentic Swing that is ours alone. It is folly to try to teach us another, or mold us to some ideal version of the perfect swing. Each player possesses only that one swing that he was born with, that swing which existed within him before he ever picked up a club. Like the statue of David, our Authentic Swing already exists, concealed within the stone, so to speak.
• I believe this is the reason for the endless fascination of golf. The game is a metaphor for the soul's search for its true ground and identity.
• We enter onto this material plane, as Wordsworth said, 'not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.' In other words, already possessing a highly refined and individuated soul. Our job here is to recall that soul and become it. To form a union with it, a yoga as they say in India.
• We cannot overcome by force of will.
• For in the end, grace comes from God, from the Authentic Self.
• The swing is never learned. It's remembered.
• What good ever came of human beings facing one another in conflict?
• What is ever gained by 'defeating' others?
• What statement can you make about what is real or important?
• So you choose not to act. As if by that choice, you will cause no harm.
• Life is action. Even choosing not to act, we act.
• There can be no cheating in the dimension in which the Self resides. There every action inexorably produces its result, every thought its consequence.
• The rain falls, with no though of watering the land. The clouds roll, not seeking to bring shade. They simply do. And we must too.
• Why did God give us a brain if not to think?
• Don't they, the animals, seem closer to God than we? Don't they seem automatically tuned to His will, guided flawlessly by instinct?
• The Knowing is everything. It is the Knowing alone that survives the death of the body. You are your Knowing.
• In sensed that every aspect of the gull's life, of the storm's life, of the planet's itself, was play. Hunting and killing included. It was all play. Only we humans broke this natural law.
• There's no tonic like youth for a quick recovery!
• The human being at his current level is incapable of perceiving Reality, except in rare ecstatic bursts. In earlier eras, men could hold that consciousness longer. In future ages, they will again.
• He had destroyed himself by his own arrogance. With his own hand he had crushed the Grace that had been granted him
• You are never alone.
• Those who seek lesser teachers go unto them.
• Play is the activity most pleasing to me. Because it is authentic.
• A day will come for you when play becomes torment.
• How can any of us know another's grief?

1/9/2007

Holes by Louis Sachar

• Whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to be able to blame someone.
• I learn from failure.
• Everyone makes mistakes. You may have done some bad things, but that doesn't mean you're a bad kid.
• He was just a fifteen-year old kid, and "eternity" didn't seem much longer than a week from Tuesday.
• Don't laugh at people's dreams.
• Nothing in life is easy. But that's no reason to give up. You'll be surprised what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it. After all, you only have one life, so you should try to make the most of it.
• The rattlesnake would be a lot more dangerous if it didn't have a rattle.
• If he didn't talk about it, then maybe it didn't happen.
• We're all equal under the eyes of God.
• Sound travels a great distance across a barren wasteland.
• In a land of nothingness, any little thing seemed unusual.
• When you spend your whole life living in a hole, the only way you can go is up.
• He thought only about each step, and not the impossible task that lay before him.
• Stanley could hear his heart beat. Each beat told him was still alive, at least for one more second.

12/29/2006

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

• Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.
• Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?
• Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it.
• That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.
• Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.
• Certain thing they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.
• If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?
• If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.
• If she was decent enough to let you get sexy with her all the time, you at least shouldn't talk about her that way.
• Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake--especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.
• Don't you think there's a time and place for everything?
• The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
• You're a student--whether the idea appeals to you or not. You're in love with knowledge.
• You're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.
• I'm not trying to tell you that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with--which, unfortunately, is rarely the case--tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important--nine times out of then they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker.
• It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible.
• You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.
• How do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't.

3/16/2007

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

• Daddy's anger had left her far away and careless
• My parents' fights just meant they loved each other in a noisy way.
• I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.
• The smile you send out returns to you.
• Idle please disguises itself as permanent happiness.
• I wondered if the whole world wasn't crazy.
• The sanctity of the confessional applied more to murderers than kids.
• That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.
• You cook your own goose when you limit yourself.
• You can be two things if you are a woman. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place--even if it kills you.
• Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet.
• He was always full of promises. He had wrecked my whole life.
• I'm not your free show!
• Teachers! There were two types: the ones who treated you like dirt and the ones who were all over you with their Geiger counters of hope.
• All the dead bolts and pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.
• I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.
• They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routine.
• You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.
• Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
• I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.
• If you played with fire, you were going to get burned.
• It was funny how my high-school education was turning out to be more useful after the fact than while they were putting me through it.
• Everything's relative. Look at the big picture.
• We owe it to our generation to get political!
• Pain would be better than not feeling anything.
• God has his reasons that you and me don't understand.
• I wanted to talk to someone, some person I hadn't failed.
• I tried to recall any other time when he had apologized to me. For over three years it had been the other way around.
• Disagreements don't alter a mother's love for her daughter. Nothing does. Nothing alters that.
• The trouble with going underwater was that you had to come back up.
• The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.
• Who was I to criticize someone else's choices? Who was I to judge?
• I don't see it as a matter of choice. Your feelings are facts.
• You create your own future.
• You build happiness out of insight and good habits.
• Show me a childhood without some sort of violence. Show me a painless childhood.
• You orchestrate happiness--you work at it. You don't catch it as it hurls toward you like a football.
• I want to live in a place where I can have a bedroom-door lock. Where I can be my real age and not have to pretend some man is my mother.
• Fate doesn't give warranties like Sears Roebuck.
• If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.
• I wondered if I hadn't made a crucial mistake, obvious to everyone but me.
• You didn't telephone people if your new life was working out.
• Different strokes for different folks.
• Everyone in the world kept secrets.
• But the Lord Almight doesn't give out any promises just because you love someone. Love only gets you so far.
• If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy like Grandma.
• Repression doesn't make it any easier. It just wastes energy.
• Foul language is part of your armor of defense.
• Not using birth control was a decision to have a baby.
• Men scare too easily.
• Without the pictures seducing you, TV was just a powerless talking ghost.
• Being complimented felt the same as being accused.
• No couple is happy all the time.
• Writing is a lot like dreaming. There's a subconscious connection. Once someone intrudes, it's like trying to go back to sleep to finish your dream.
• His words had burned me more times than they'd soothed me. I cautioned myself not to be taken in by this verbal Noxzema.
• Death angered loved ones because it made them feel powerless.
• You sit around feelin' sorry for yourself and you're dead. Sittin' on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got.
• Life's a shit sandwich, but only if you're a shithead.
• People don't fall so neatly into the categories you put them in--heroes and villains, unfettered and--fettered?
• You just shouldn't make promises you don't intend to keep.
• The whole world would work right if people just tried being an inch and a half nicer to each other.
• My whole life used to throb like a toothache.
• The secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes. Instead of, you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.
• Life's absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining.
• Love was always the thing that did that--smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
• Good catches are a mixed blessing.
• I just don't believe in happily-ever-after. It's a crock of shit! I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you...happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit.
• People waste their happiness--that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.
• Accept what people offer. Take their love.
• Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
• Whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too.

12/19/2006