Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells

• Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.--Katherine Mansfield
• It can wear you to a nub, trying to be a popular person and a good Catholic all at the same time.
• If you can't sing it good, Siddalee, at least sing it loud.
• I forget to worry about the next breath, just trust it's gonna come.
• It's the story of my life: not stingy, just a goddamn coward.
• Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves those black letters marching across the white pages. When Sidda falls in love with a book, she is positive that she is the very first person in the world to have discovered it, poor child. Thinks that no one else anywhere, anytime, has ever heard of the book.
• To Sidda and me, books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them.
• Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to.
• When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.
• Don't ever underestimate the power women have over men. And don't ever let them know you have it either.
• You can't run away from things, Siddalee. You've got to stay in this house where your life is. Don't you think I want to run off and hide in a bookmobile or join the circus? We all do. But we have responsibilities.
• You cannot escape from life. Life is not a book. You can't just set it down on the coffee table and walk away from it when it gets boring or you get tired.
• I can do anything in the world I want and no one can stop me. I am a born leader.
• Thoughts have a lot of power. Just thinking about committing a sin is the same thing as actually doing it.
• There is no excuse to let your looks go, no matter how poor you are. Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but honey let me tell you, ugliness will get you nowhere.
• I take my quiet wherever I can find it.
• God will not allow us to be overwhelmed by temptation, but with it He will provide a way of escape so that we will be able to endure it.
• I can never fall asleep until everything is organized and ready to go at the foot of my bed.
• It's running my mouth so much that gets me in trouble to begin with.
• All I am is Gimmee Gimmee Gimmee, and after a while people get sick of me.
• If it's one thing I learnt in this life, it's to bite my tongue when I got to, and yell when I don't.
• You can't look back. Good Lord didn't mean for us to hate ourself. He made us to love ourself like He do, with wide open arms.
• Cause some people God give to you to look out after, and that just be how it is.
• Don't every worry bout bein holy, babychild. Just keep your eyes wide open except when you sleep. Then let the Lord's mighty vision see you through the night.
• I'd like to tell her more, but you just never do know how people are gonna react to things.
• You learn to take your thrills where you can find them.
• Well, we got ourselves into this thing, we got to get ourselves out.
• A man's gotta have somebody to hand his land over to, or what the hell's it all for?
• Lots of times people make the mistake of underestimating you on account of the way you talk.
• It's by a man's eyes that you know his intelligence.
• If we're fighting a war, then let's get it the hell over with!
• You gotta turn it over, is what you gotta do. You gotta give it to the Lord.
• You oughta thank the Good Lord you got two legs to stand on.
• I go to church on Sunday, sleep good at night, and when there's a rain comin in, I stand out on my porch and smell the earth.
• Judgin up to the Good Lord hisself and nobody else.
• Some people, they is gonna be unhappy no matter what. You could give them every'thing you have. Take the blood out you own body and give it to them and they'd still be miserable. That just be the way it is.
• We done lived down the road from sadness all our lives. But you gotta know what sadness be yours and what be somebody else's, is what I say.
• You think somebody gonna throw us a party or somethin for gettin through all this? No sir. You don't get no trophies for livin the life you born into. It just be your job, and you lucky if you can do the work set out in front of you and not fret if it seem puny. Maybe the Good Lord ain't give us nothin but puny things. Little bitta things sparkin through our days and nights. In the fields and in the mornin air, little bitta things that if you blink your eye, they be gone and ain't never comin back.
• I have always found that if you are ever in doubt about how to behave, just act like a hostess, and it'll see you over the rough spots.
• You simply must have decent telephone manners in this world or you will get absolutely nowhere.
• Hold on. If it's meant to be, it'll happen. You have all the time in the world.
• We all need blessings in our cribs, we all need protection from the witches.

1/20/2010--12:04 pm

Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

• A quick end is a good end.
• In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.
• What a waste, she thinks, to spend one's dreams asleep.
• How long does a dream have to last before it's just life?
• You could drive yourself crazy with ifs.
• People who are happy don't really need to ask themselves if they are happy or not, do they? They just are happy, she thinks.
• Your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence.
• Liz shakes her head, vowing to omit um and all equally meaningless words (uh, like, huh, sorta, kinda, oh, hey, maybe) from her vocabulary.
• Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in Canine?
• Even when the body is well, you still find that the mind...Well, the mind has a mind of its own.
• Dead is little more than a state of mind. Many people on Earth spend their whole lives dead.
• The point is the journey.
• Be happy! It's easier to be happy than to be sad. Being sad takes a lot of work. It's exhausting.
• A man should always be as honest as he can.
• Liz finds telling lies easy now that she's started. The only problem (as many before Liz have discovered) is that she has to keep telling more and more of them.
• People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or all bad. Sometimes they're a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes, they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.
• The only way to absolutely ensure things will go badly is to be late.
• Life is better with a little adventure.
• It's difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything's changed.
• Is it weird to like something and not even know why you like it?
• As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (though not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.
• What's Shakespeare say? "The course of true love never did run smooth."
• You'll find that the world has a way of working things out.
• Just because someone did something before doesn't mean they have to do it still.
• Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living. Life is better with a little romance, you know.
• If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.
• There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and for Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecisions and revisions. And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles. And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk. And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything. Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess.
• Happiness is a choice.
• When one is happy, time passes quickly.
• A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.
• I believe good things happen every day. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen.

1/17/2010--11:08 pm