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