Escape by Carolyn Jessop

• Why should I feel disgraced? I knew in my heart that there was nothing wrong with being a woman. I wanted to roar like a woman. I knew that would never be allowed, but that didn't stop me from being proud of myself. I was a woman, not a fake!
• No one wants to be made to feel inferior.
• Nothing seemed crueler than the loss of a child.
• Sadness was acceptable during the immediate aftermath, but questioning God was not.
• God had the right to give and right to take away.
• The death of a family member was actually a blessing because it gave our family a representative on the other side who would try to protect us.
• Where much is given, much is required.
• If you put yourself in a place where the devil has sole power, he can take your life.
• I loved the steadying rhythm of the waves. It was powerful but not at all frightening. I felt small, safe, and protected.
• People who have never been taught or allowed to think for themselves don't suddenly change. Change is too frightening.

12/20/2009--5:45 p.m.

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

• When flames are licking at your heels you've got to break a wall or two if you want to escape.
• People who have been backed into a corner will do anything to fight their way to the center again.
• You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain you're making a mistake?
• Half the battle is figuring out what works for you.
• I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.
• Since when does anyone get the option to do what's easiest?
• A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.
• A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.
• There are always sides. There is always a winner, and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.
• If you focus on sandbagging the beachhead, you can ignore the tsunami that's approaching.
• It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.
• Zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.
• Helping someone who needs it is the right thing to do.
• What do parents look like? You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.
• No matter who you are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else.
• There is a moment during a structure fire when you know you are either going to get the upper hand, or that it's going to get the upper hand on you. You notice the ceiling patch about to fall and the staircase eating itself alive and the synthetic carpet glued to the soles of your boots. The sum of the parts overwhelms, and that's when you back out and force yourself to remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help.
• Dark matter has a gravitational effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.
• Nobody ever wants what they've got.
• If you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving.
• That's pretty much the way it goes--fix one leak in the dike just in time to watch another one start spouting.
• There are no guarantees about anything, least of all one's future.
• Why are terms of endearment always foods? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. It's not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.
• Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in.
• Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them?
• There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.
• There are some nights when you just want to know there's someone else besides you in this wide world.
• Fortunes were like clay and could be reshaped at any time. But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else's, and for some people that just wasn't good enough.
• You will always be up against someone. Something.
• You ought to be attracted to someone for what they've got inside them, not for the package it's presented in.
• Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.
• Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.
• Time is an optical illusion--never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.
• It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.
• There is a point when a structure fire is raging out of control that you simply have to give it the distance to burn itself out. So you move back to safety, to a hill out of the wind, and you watch the building eat itself alive.
• When you don't know where you're headed, you find places no one else would ever think to explore.
• Life sometimes get so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it.
• Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.
• You have to be able to laugh at yourself, don't you?
• Morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.
• See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.

9/12/2009--12:56 am

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

• I'm sure about you. The rest I can live through.
• There couldn't be a law if there was no punishment; there couldn't be a punishment if there was no one to deliver it.
• Strong emotions can alter us in permanent ways.
• The past is past and I can't do anything to change it.
• What's the point to all the pain?
• You always want the very most what you can never, ever have.
• That's the funny thing about knowing you can't have something. It makes you desperate.
• Each new disaster seemed kinda obvious in hindsight.
• It wouldn't be good to let any emotion take too strong a hold on my frame of mind.
• I knew there was a lot that I needed to see for myself before it would be real.
• Not many people get every single thing they want, plus all the things they didn't think to ask for, in the same day.
• All I wanted was to love him as much as possible in the limited time given to me.
• Whatever end found us, it would not find us separated.
• None of us can entirely control our subconscious desires.
• Only the known is safe. Only the known is tolerable. The unknown is...a vulnerability.
• Not that I'd want to repeat the last several weeks, but I had to admit they'd made me appreciate what I had more than ever.

8/8/2009--10:35 PM

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

• It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
• A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.
• History isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion.
• A person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.
• That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
• Coming close wasn't the same as winning, was it?
• Winners won and everyone else just went home.
• Better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
• They say there is a brotherhood between people who've fed from the same breast.
• Nothing was free in this world.
• In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.
• War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
• People need stories to divert them at difficult times.
• Boys and girls must know the legacy of their fathers.
• What happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.
• Bruises healed. Reputations did not.
• Sad stories make good books.
• How could I, of all people, chastise someone for their past?
• I firmly believed that if I had picked up a rifle and gone on a murdering rampage, I would have still had the benefit of her unblinking love.
• Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they're just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nangand namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.
• There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.
• It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
• Time can be a greedy thing--sometimes it steals all the details for itself.
• A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
• And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, when guilt leads to good.
• There are bad people in this world, and sometimes bad people stay bad. Sometimes you have to stand up to them.
• Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

6/25/2009--9:33 PM

Sundays at Tiffany's by James Patterson

• Love means you can never be apart.
• Nothing is more important in life than giving and receiving love.
• Honey, I don't want to ride the train. I want to drive the train.
• People always remember the worst day of their lives. It becomes part of them forever.
• When your own romantic life is falling apart, everyone else's looks fabulous.
• He'd never met a lonely, depressed soul he didn't want to try to help somehow.
• Maybe beauty, true beauty, is so overwhelming, it goes straight to our hearts. Maybe it makes us feel emotions that are locked away inside.
• He couldn't fix that little boys weren't allowed to show their emotions, and that seemed unfair to them, and made them as angry as hell, sometimes for the rest of their lives, so that they took it out on everybody, but especially women.
• There's nothing better than love in this life. This is a tall order--but find somebody to love you, and try your hardest to love her back, the best you can.
• You are an endless project. Changing, evolving, surprising.
• The fantasy is much better than the reality.
• Looking well is the best revenge.
• Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Book Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from another.
• Is it so impossible to imagine or believe?--that a man and a woman can find happiness together for a little while, which, after all, is all that we have. All anyone has.

6/4/2009--10:02 PM

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

• Even a rough sketch, a shadow, a tiny fragment of a dad is still a dad.
• Success soothes my aching muscles.
• The BMW's doors click softly shut. Someone once told me that you can tell a good car by the quality of that click.

5/31/2009--2:03 PM

One For the Money by Janet Evanovich

• There are some men who enter a woman's life and screw it up forever.
• In my opinion, the only good spider is a dead spider, and woman's rights aren't worth dick if they mean I can't ask a man to do my bug squashing.
• Fear is not a logical emotion. No one can physically hurt me on the phone.
• Never let your guard down. You have to see everything, every second. You let your mind wander, and you could be dead.
• Some promises are meant to be broken.
• I understand that you're scared. I get scared, too. But we're the good guys, and the good guys always win.
• You do something often enough, and you become complacent.

5/21/2009--8:54 P.M.

The Shack by William P. Young

• I suppose that since most of our hurts come through relationships so will our healing, and I know that grace rarely makes sense for those looking in from the outside.
• While some things may not be scientifically provable, they can still be true nonetheless.
• There is often some compensation in every trial, if one looked hard enough.
• It is so easy to get sucked into the if-only game, and playing it is a short and slippery slide into despair.
• There are times when you choose to believe something that would normally be considered absolutely irrational. It doesn't mean that it is actually irrational, but it surely is not rational. Perhaps there is supra rationality: reason beyond the normal definitions of fact or data-based logic; something that only makes sense if you can see a bigger picture of reality. Maybe that is where faith fits in.
• Sometimes honesty can be incredibly messy.
• As much as he longed to stop the ache in his heart, he knew he could not add to their hurt.
• It does a soul good to let the waters run once in a while--the healing waters.
• Don't go because you feel obligated. That won't get you any points around here. Go because it's what you want to do.
• Life takes a bit of time and a lot of relationship.
• Love always makes a significant mark.
• Humans are not defined by their limitations, but by the intentions that I have for them; not by what they seem to be, but by everything it means to be created in my image.
• It is not about winning and losing, but about love and respect.
• Once you begin to know the being behind the very pretty or very ugly face, as determined by your bias, the surface appearances fade away until they simply no longer matter.
• I am with you and I'm not lost. I'm sorry it feels that way, but hear me clearly. You are not lost.
• Dreams are sometimes important, you know. They can be a way of openin' up the window and lettin' the bad air out.
• I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It's not my purpose to punish it; it's my joy to cure it.
• Humans have a great capacity for declaring something good or evil, without truly knowing.
• I tend to sound justifiably angry when somebody is threatening my 'good,' you know, what I think I deserve. But I'm not really sure I have any logical ground for deciding what is actually good or evil, except how something or someone affects me.
• Who doesn't jump to conclusions about others from the way they impact us.
• The darkness hides the true size of fears and lies and regrets. The truth is they are more shadow than reality, so they seem bigger in the dark. When the light shines into the places they live inside you, you start to see them for what they are.
• Each choice ripples out through time and relationships, bouncing off of other choices.
• You're only seeing the institution, a man-made system. That's not what I came to build. What I see are people and their lives, a living breathing community of all those who love me, not buildings and programs.
• You don't need to have it all figured out. Just be with me.
• I don't create institutions; that's an occupation for those who want to play God.
• If you try to live this without me, without the ongoing dialogue of us sharing this journey together, it will be like trying to walk on the water by yourself. You can't! And when you try, however well-intentioned, you're going to sink.
• All I want from you is to trust me with what little you can, and grow in loving people around you with the same love I share with you. It's not your job to change them, or to convince them. You are free to love without an agenda.
• Grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.
• Guilt'll never help you find freedom in me. The best it can do is make you try harder to conform to some ethic on the outside. I'm about the inside.
• Lies are one of the easiest places for survivors to run. It gives you a sense of safety, a place where you only have to depend on yourself.
• Lies are a little fortress; inside them you can feel safe and powerful. Through your little fortress of lies you try to run your life and manipulate others. But the fortress needs walls, so you build some. These are the justifications for your lies. You know, like you are doing this to protect someone you love, to keep them from feeling pain. Whatever works, just so you feel okay about the lies.
• Nobody knows what horrors I have saved the world from 'cuz people can't see what never happened.
• Love that is forced is no love at all.
• It is not the nature of love to force a relationship but it is the nature of love to open the way.
• For you to know or not has nothing at all to do with whether I am actually here or not. I am always with you; sometimes I want you to be aware in a special way--more intentional.
• Emotions are the colors of the soul; they are spectacular and incredible. When you don't feel, the world becomes dull and colorless.
• Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe. The more you live in the truth, the more your emotions will help you see clearly. But even then, you don't want to trust them more than me.
• There are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of right things from their brain because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don't know me at all. So really, how can their answers be right even if they are right, if you understand my drift? So even though they might be right, they are still wrong.
• In Jesus you are not under any law. All things are lawful.
• Responsibilities and expectations are the basis of guilt and shame and judgment, and they provide the essential framework that promotes performance as the basis for identity and value. You know well what it is like not to live up to someone's expectations.
• Each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. That is why you cannot love two people the same. It simply is not possible. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out of you. And the more you know another, the richer the colors of that relationship.
• If Papa had wanted him to know, he would have told him.
• Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat.
• Forgiveness does not create a relationship.
• Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive.
• Just say it out loud. There is power in what my children declare.
• If anything matters then everything matters. Because you are important, everything you do is important. Every time you forgive, the universe changes; every time you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen, my purposes are accomplished and nothing will ever be the same again.

5/17/2009--6:53 PM

Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

• His touch brought with it the strangest sense of relief--as if I'd been in pain and that pain had suddenly ceased.
• The right thing isn't always real obvious. Sometimes the right thing for one person is the wrong thing for someone else. So...good luck figuring that out.
• There's always a compromise.
• A smart person looks at all sides of a decision.
• Some people will go to any lengths to delude themselves.
• It's possible to love more than one person at a time.
• I couldn't allow what hurt me to influence my decisions anymore. It was too little, much too late, but I had to do what was right now. Maybe it was already done for me.
• I may gain forgiveness, but that doesn't let me escape the consequences.
• Broken rules demand a consequence.
• You are safe inside your mind. No one can reach you there.

4/25/2009 12:37pm

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

• No one wants a spotlight when they're likely to fall on their face.
• Some people's lives are better because I exist.
• Change was coming. I could feel it. It wasn't a pleasant prospect, not when life was perfect the way it was.
• I saw no reason for fear. I couldn't imagine anything in the world that there was left to be afraid of, not physically at least. One of the few advantages of losing everything.
• It didn't feel like the pain had weakened over time, rather that I'd grown strong enough to bear it.
• He could steal my pictures and reclaim his gifts but that didn't put things back the way they'd been before I'd met him.
• Where was the logic in sticking to an agreement that had already been violated by the other party?
• Love gave someone the power to break you.
• Sometimes...things are set in motion, and then it's too late.
• When people get too excited, accidents happen...
• Once you cared about a person, it was impossible to be logical about them anymore.
• It's not what you are, stupid, it's what you do!
• Love is irrational. The more you loved someone, the less sense anything made.
• How many ways can one heart be mangled and still be expected to keep beating?
• After all the thousand times I've told you I love you, how could you let one word break your faith in me?
• Why can you believe the lie, but not the truth?
• What if you were so stubbornly sure that you were right, that you wouldn't even consider the truth? Would the truth be silenced, or would it try to break through?
• Being angry about things was easier than feeling guilty.

4/2/2009--10:30 PM

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

• When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.
• I do a good job of blocking painful, unneccessary things from my memory.
• Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs.
• It was hard to believe that someone so beautiful could be real. I was afraid that he might disappear in a sudden puff of smoke, and I would wake up.
• I decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly.
• I wasn't going out without taking someone with me.
• If leaving is the right thing to do, then I'll hurt myself to keep from hurting you.
• I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars.
• I had to keep reminding myself that I'd made my choice, and I wasn't going back on it.
• Even the strongest of us fall off the wagon, don't we?
• There's nothing like an unsolved mystery to keep you up at night.
• Human memories fade.
• The future isn't set in stone. Things change.
• If I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it.
• Isn't it supposed to be like this? The glory of first love, and all that. It's incredible, isn't it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?
• Just because we've been...dealt a certain hand...it doesn't mean that we can't choose to rise above--to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted.
• Love and lust don't always keep the same company.
• There are exceptions to every rule.
• Memories were better than any reality.
• It's possible to take bravery to the point where it becomes insanity.

3/16/2009 12:24am

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

• I tried to forget that this was my life, the reason I'd spent four long years memorizing poems and examining prose, the result of good grades and lots of kissing up.
• I was reasonably sure that I had reached a new moral low--what was worrisome was that I'd sunk to it so naturally.
• I lied quickly, remembering a Cosmo article I'd read that had exhorted me to "keep it light and airy and happy" when talking to a new guy because most "normal" guys didn't respond so well to hard-bitten cynicism.
• Don't talk about yourself too much, don't dominate the conversation, get him comfortable enough to chat about his favorite and most familiar topic: him.
• She loved anyone and anything that didn't love her back, so long as it made her feel alive.
• It was just when it came time to look in the mirror that everyone genuinely saw a wildebeest staring back.
• She's lucky she's got you for a friend. Otherwise she'd be all alone in the world.
• I could only imagine how much Miranda was hating being addressed as "ma'am," which, as everyone knows, connotes old lady all the way.
• If she didn't think you did a great job, she'd have gotten rid of you already.
• FASHION IS NOT FOR ADVERTISING YOUR FAVE SEX ACTS ON YOUR SHIRT.
• Everything would just sort itself out if I just stopped worrying so much.
• Any armchair shrink could easily point out that my outward enthusiasm was meant to overcompensate for all that was lacking inwardly.
• Early morning was always preferred because people's makeup would be fresh and their clothes unwrinkled.
• We hung up on good terms, but I couldn't shake the feeling that my own parents were disappointed in me.

3/10/2009--12:11 a.m.

Singing Songs by Meg Tilly

• Cultured and refined people don't call other people fakes or liars.
• I knew you had to have hardships before you became magic.
• You can't spend your day making people feel stupid and then expect them to want to eat lunch with you.
• She knew shutting her eyes wouldn't help. But somehow, there was that belief that if she couldn't see him...then he couldn't see her.
• Never think you're too good for a man. If someone wants to take you out, you go out and count your blessings.
• If there is one thing I can't stand, it's being pitied.
• I could do anything. Anything in the world I set my mind to.

1/4/2009 12:58 pm

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

• Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are.
• Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.
• Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist.
• Only peons made excuses for themselves. Never apologize, never explain.
• She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they'd been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T'ang Dynasty.
• She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.
• It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man's anything.
• Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
• How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?
• Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.
• It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.
• Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind. But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing.
• The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence.
• You are the judge of what is true.
• I've got to believe in something.
• If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.
• Everybody needed to feel love.
• A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved.
• After all the fears, the warnings; After all; A woman's mistakes are different from a girl's; They are written by fire on stone; They are a trait and not an error...
• Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
• You never knew when rescue might come.
• Despair was the killer. I had to prepare, hold hope between my palms like the flame of the last match in a long Arctic night.
• At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
• What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
• You enjoy anything you're good at.
• What's real is always worth it.
• I should know enough by now not to expect anything from life.
• What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.
• Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness.
• When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
• Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.
• I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day, no matter what.
• It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
• She's never where she is. She's only inside her head.
• Certain people should always be lied to.
• I don't think people should fool around with things they don't believe in.
• When you committed suicide, you didn't want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.
• How long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?
• Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
• If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away.
• Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings.
• Perfect was always too much to ask.
• If something is wrong, you can't just turn it to the wall.
• Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
• People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.
• What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.
• I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.
• People just wanted to be loved.
• Everybody left you eventually.
• Without my wounds, who was I?
• I never let anyone touch me.
• My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.
• "Love the One You're With" was the tune life kept forcing on me, and yet there I was, hope fluttering like a bird in my hand.
• You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.
• One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.
• Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
• I knew nothing but that was the place to begin.
• I don't have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.
• I can't remake the world just by willing it so.
• What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned.
• How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
• What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler's coat, something that didn't belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn't it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.
• The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.
• The reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. You could to anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history.
• These days, I had given up trying to understand what was right or wrong, what mattered or didn't.
• You accrued virtue just by doing a good job with whatever you were doing, completely applying yourself to the task at hand.
• Nobody waited for anybody.
• Love. I would ban the word from the vocabulary. Such imprecision. Love, which love, what love? Sentiment, fantasy, longing, lust? Obsession, devouring need? Perhaps the only love that is accurate without qualification is the love of a very young child.
• Love is a bedtime story, a teddy bear, familiar, one eye missing.
• I had to face this, that people left and you didn't see them again.
• Don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
• Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them?
• You had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them.
• There was no such thing as an empty canvas.
• Stand up for myself, beat on the bars until I got what I needed.
• It's the century of the displaced person. You can never go home.
• I hadn't come this far to be left at some river bottom among the wrecked cars.

1/2/2009 12:09 AM