The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

• In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.
• 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.'
• Funny how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does.
• I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.
• So once you do know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means.
• I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.
• Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.
• The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

11/11/2011

Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

• Anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.
• In the real world, the best circumstances don't always come to be. In the real world, "forever" may only be a weekend.
• I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day.
• It's not like marriage is the peak of your life. You can be married, I think, but that doesn't necessarily mean you are in love.
• You can't just keep yourself from falling for a person. You can't turn off your emotions like a faucet.
• When you're with other people living the same life as you, you feel better.
• I will not call to them when I do not know what to say. I won't reveal myself without having anything to show.
• Age differentials tend to become less pronounced as one grows older, but during adolescence, five and a half years is an entire lifetime.
• When you get married, you make the biggest decision of your life; you say you're going to spend eternity with one person. So what do you do if that person leaves? What do you do once you've already committed yourself?
• In this world, there's only one person with whom you are meant to connect. This is a God-woven thread. You cannot change it; you cannot fight it. The person is not necessarily your wife or your husband, your long-term lover. It may not even be a good friend. In many cases it is not someone with whom you spend the rest of your life. I would hazard a guess that ninety percent of all people never find the other person. But those lucky few, those very lucky few, are given the chance to grab the brass ring.
• You have to work with your loose ends and see what you can make of them.
• If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.
• I believe that you can fall in love many times with many different people. However I don't think that you can fall in love the same way twice. One type of relationship may be steady. Another may be fire and brimstone. Who is to say if one of these is better than the other? The deciding factor is how it all fits together. Your love, I mean, and your life. The problem is that when you're old enough to really find a soul mate, you're already carrying around all this extra baggage. Like where you grew up, and how much money you make, and whether you like the country or the city. And sometimes, most of the time, you fall really hard for someone who you just can't squeeze into the limits of your life. The bottom line is: when your heart seats its sight on someone, it doesn't consult with your mind.
• You can tell yourself anything you want, but you can't make what happened go away.

11/4/2011

Dracula by Bram Stoker

• A stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not--and to know not is to care not for.
• A woman ought to tell her husband everything.
• I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.
• How many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives?
• Life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin'; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.
• Though sympathy can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.
• All men are mad in some way or the other; and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen, too--the rest of the world. You tell not your madmen what you do nor why you do it; you tell them not what you think. So you shall keep knowledge in its place, where it may rest--where it may gather its kind around it and breed.
• When the corn is grown, even before it has ripened--while the milk of its mother-earth is in him, and the sunshine has not yet begun to paint him with his gold, the husbandman he pull the ear and rub him between his rough hands, and blow away the green chaff, and say to you: 'Look! he's good corn; he will make good crop when the time comes.'
• The good husbandman tell you so then because he knows but not till then. But you do not find the good husbandman dig up his planted corn to see if he grow; that is for the children who play at husbandry, and not for those who take it as of the work of their life.
• Knowledge is stronger than memory and we should not trust the weaker.
• Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!
• How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.
• My belief in him helps him to have a belief in himself.
• Let us not be two, but one, that so we work to a good end.
• Devotion is so rare, and we are so grateful to those who show it unasked to those we love.
• We and you too will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet. But we must be brave of heart and unselfish, and do our duty, and all will be well!
• We men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come; and, like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great; and we break.
• I suppose a cry does us all good at times--clears the air as other rain does.
• Trust cannot be where there is mean nature.
• I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it be. I have tried to keep an open mind; and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.
• Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?
• Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young--like the fine ladies at the opera.
• There are always mysteries in life.
• I heard once of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.
• The world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.
• The milk that is spilt cries not out afterwards.
• Everything that one does seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring on the very thing which is most to be deplored.
• It is wonderful what tricks our dreams play us, and how conveniently we can imagine.
• It is in trouble and trial that our faith is tested.
• For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the burden that is hard upon us.
• God will act in His own way and time. Do not fear, and do not rejoice as yet; for what we wish for at the moment may be our undoings.
• It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way--even by death--and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.'
• And to superstition must we trust at the first; it was man's faith in the early, and it have its root in faith still.

10/26/2011

Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich

• This is part of the problem with the world today. People don't believe in the mystical.
• A book of spells is nothing more than a cookbook. Over the years, recipes have evolved for sponge cake, lobster bisque, spontaneous combustion, cheese souffle, levitation, enchantment. It's really not rocket science.
• I read a book about getting published, and it said persistence would pay off.
• Possessed implies that demons or other dis-incarnate entities have temporarily taken control of a body.
• Your life isn't out of control. It's expanded.
• Could be covers a lot of ground.
• Everyone makes their own luck.

10/7/2011

For One More Day by Mitch Albom

• Every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.
• You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
• It's like this line is drawn somewhere in the world and if you never cross it, you'll never consider throwing yourself off a building or swallowing a bottle of pills--but if you do, you might.
• The truth is, there is no line. There's only your life, how you mess it up, and who is there to save you. Or who isn't.
• One day can bend your life.
• When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those you love.
• When your parents die, you feel like instead of going into every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.
• Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in.
• When you're that young, you nest in your parents' plans, not your own.
• She told me I was smart and that being smart was a privilege, and she insisted that I read one book every week, and took me to the library to make sure this happened.
• Don't you ever tell a child something's too hard.
• I don't know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make--pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad--but it carries a certain taste of memory.
• Sometimes kids want you to hurt the way they hurt.
• A child embarrassed by his mother is just a child who hasn't lived long enough.
• Going back to something is harder than you think.
• You do what you gotta do to hold your family together.
• There may be times that you fight, and sometimes you won't even like each other. But those are the times you have to love your marriage. It's like a third party. Look at your wedding photos. Look at any memories you've made. And if you believe in those memories, they will pull you back together.
• The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature. You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.
• When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.
• You count the hours you could have spent with your mother. It's a lifetime in itself.
• A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.
• The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.
• I think you have to try things in life. Belief, hard work, love--you have those things, you can do anything.
• When you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.
• You make it up as you go along.
• You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.
• Parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you'll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn't. But there's a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.
• One day spent with someone you love can change everything.

7/17/2011

The Help by Kathryn Sockett

• The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.
• My real dream was that one day I would write something that people would actually read.
• Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person.
• Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?
• All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
• What would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?
• Dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town.
• I feel guilty for not being nicer to her, for not needing her until my own life turns bad.
• White people been representing colored opinions since the beginning a time.
• My motto on housekeeping: when in doubt, wash it out.
• It was a accident. Kicking her ain't gone do us no good.
• Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you, it's so good.
• Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.
• Everybody care. Black, white, deep down we all do.
• It ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside.
• I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.
• Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn. I used to believe in em. I don't anymore. They in our heads. People make us believe they there. But they ain't.
• Kindness don't have no boundaries.
• I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.
• Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.
• I am looking for a future for myself. I like to hear about the possibilities of others.
• There is so much you don't know about a person. I wonder if I could've made her days a little bit easier, if I'd tried. If I'd treated her a little nicer.
• When she do things, they done the first time.
• Trying to understand is vital to our humanity.

7/16/2011

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

• Something always turned up.
• Tom could not help feeling that Richard was not very intelligent, or else he loved to be photographed and thought he looked best with his mouth spread from ear to ear, which was not very intelligent of him, either.
• Did anybody human keep rubbing a thing like that in a child's face? Lots of aunts and even strangers raised a child for nothing and were delighted to do it.
• You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, to see love through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside.
• It was very much like the feeling on Christmas Eve in Paris, a feeling that everyone was watching him, as if he had an audience made up of the entire world, a feeling that kept him on his mettle, because to make a mistake would be catastrophic.
• But if he could only sit tight, nothing at all would happen.
• His anticipation was more pleasant to him than his experiencing.
• If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.
• I'm going to enjoy what I've got as long as it lasts.
• It was not wise to underestimate one's opponent.
• Did the world always mete out just deserts?

June 25, 2011

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

• If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything.
• I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
• There's no keeping a born scholar ignorant.
• Act when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might.
• Enlightenment's supposed to come with the prayer, not before it.
• I'm sick to death of being the heavy in everybody's life.
• Knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!
• There are nice things in the world-and I mean nice things. We're all such morons to get so sidetracked.
• There isn't any prayer in any religion in the world that justifies piousness.
• Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look?
• The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world.
• An artists's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.

5/1/2011

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

• But what can I possibly say? "Terrible things go on in the night while you and I are asleep"? The jackal rips out the hare's bowels, but the world rolls on.


• Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.


• If you want to do something, you do it. If you had wanted to do it you would have done it.


• That is what war is about: compelling a choice on someone who would not otherwise make it.


• All I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends.


• What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out.


• You think you know what is just and what is not. I understand. We all think we know.


• We are fallen creatures. All we can do is to uphold the laws, all of us, without allowing the memory of justice to fade.


• I am terrified. I am terrified to think what is going to become of us. I try to hope for the best and live from day to day. But sometimes all of a sudden I find myself imagining what might happen and I am paralyzed with fear.


• This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.

4/23/2011

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

• Don't we love children, in part, because they live outside the realm of cynicism and irony?


• These days, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.


• This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead.


• Sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one's own convictions.


• There is so little love in the world.


• There is comfort in facing the full range of options; in considering all your choices, fearlessly and without guile.


• If you shout loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all the noise is about.


• Better, really, to face the fin in the water than to live in hiding.


• "I love you" has become almost ordinary, being said not only on anniversaries and birthdays but spontaneously, in bed or at the kitchen sink or even in cabs within hearing of foreign drivers who believe women should walk three paces behind their husbands.


• We did the best we could, dear. That's all anyone can do, isn't it?


• We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

4/9/2011

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

• Your soul is the whole world. It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman.
• One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it.
• Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.
• Nobody finds salvation through teachings.
• It is not for me to judge another life. I must judge for myself. I must choose and reject.
• One can beg, buy, be presented with and find love in the streets, but it can never be stolen.
• Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.
• Everyone gives what he has. The soldier gives strength, the merchant goods, the teacher instruction, the farmer rice, the fisherman fish.
• One cannot have pleasure without giving it, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every single part of the body has its secret which can give pleasure to one who can understand. Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.
• Nothing was ever achieved by scolding. If a loss has been sustained, I will bear the loss.
• Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
• Disclosing his wound to this listener was the same as bathing it in the river, until it became cool and one with the river.
• What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.
• When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.
• In striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
• Many people have to change a great deal and wear all sorts of clothes.
• I have become aware of knowledge, just as one feels life in one's heart.
• Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
• Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
• In every truth the opposite is equally true.
• Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
• The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people--eternal life.
• Everything that exists is good--death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.
• Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
• Love is the most important thing in the world.
• It is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

4/5/2011

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
• It takes two to make an accident.
• It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.
• There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.
• I love you now--isn't that enough?
• She wanted her life shaped now, immediately--and the decision must be made by some force--of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality--that was close at hand.
• A bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver.

4/5/2011

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

• There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

2/3/2007

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

• Even in the grave all is not lost.

4/1/2011

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

• But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul.


• Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

2/13/2007

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

• I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead.
• I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.
• It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.
• Everybody has to feel superior to somebody. But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.
• Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.
• You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.
• It's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.
• I haven't anything against whores. Except this: some of them may have an honest tongue but they all have dishonest hearts.
• A person ought to be able to marry men or women or--listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o' War, I'd respect your feeling. No, I'm serious. Love should be allowed.
• Good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean.
• Home is where you feel at home. I'm still looking.

3/27/2011

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

• One has only a life of one's own.
• What is the conqueror's wife, if not a conquest herself?
• Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same.
• The Lord helps those who help themselves.
• All grown-ups aren't equally immune to damage.
• Bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace.
• He doesn't deliver us out of our hardships but through them.
• Sometimes I pray to remember, other times I pray to forget. It makes no difference.
• I held him in my arms at night and saw parts of his soul turn to ash. Then I saw him reborn, with a stone in place of his heart.
• Sometimes you need to scare a person a little for her own good.
• The game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.
• Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
• If your brother is going to steal your hen, save your honor and give it to him first.
• Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did nothing to earn?
• Oh mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
• Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.
• Whenever you have plenty of something, you have to share it with the fyata (no money).
• Sometimes you just want to lay on down and look at the whole world sideways.
• If everyone lived to be old, then old age would not be such a treasure.
• If your belly was empty and you saw whole baskets of bread on the other side of a window, would you continue waiting patiently? Or would you throw a rock?
• It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
• You can't keep a new fire low; it must grow or die.
• When someone has much more than he can use, it's very reasonable to expect he will not keep it all himself.
• When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up.
• Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.
• If you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you'll go crazy if you think it's all punishment for your sins. God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
• The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again.
• If there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.
• Sometimes you just have to save your neck and work out the details later. Like that little book said: Stick out your elbows, pick up your feet, and float along with the crowd! The last thing you want to do is get trampled to death.
• When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.
• Sometimes I feel like the only person for miles around who hasn't given up.
• For everything that has ever come into my mind, there is already a book written about it.
• Marriage is one long fit of compromise, deep and wide. There is always one agenda swallowing another, a squeaky wheel crying out.
• You just can't assume that what's right or wrong for us is the same as what was right or wrong for them.
• We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.
• If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles.
• The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
• Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.
• But in my dreams I still have hope, and in life, no safe retreat. If I have to hop all the way on one foot, damn it, I'll find a place I can claim as home.
• Sometimes life doesn't give you all that many chances at being good.
• You choose your path and stick to it and suffer your consequences.
• You don't have to like it but you sure have to admit it's out there. You have your way of thinking and it has its, and never the train ye shall meet! You just don't let it influence your mind. If there's ugly things going on out there, well, you put a good stout lock on your door and check it twice before you go to sleep. You focus on getting your own little place set up perfect. Other people's worries do not necessarily have to drag you down.
• We are the balance of our damage and our transgressions.
• Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

3/18/2011--1 a.m.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Can't keep on with the same stuff all the time. Gets boring.
• It doesn't really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home.
• It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.
• It was up to each of us to make of our lives what we could.
• If students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent.
• The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading.

2/14/2011--10:05 am

Timbuktu by Paul Auster

• Know thine enemy--and then keep a wide berth.
• No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him.
• Since life was a gamble anyway, why not go for broke?
• The more wretched your life was, the closer you were to the truth, to the gritty nub of existence.
• Throw yourself into the arms of the world and the air will hold you. Hold back and the world will jump you from behind.
• Good stories were not necessarily true stories.
• It all balances out in the end, doesn't it? Just when you think you're top gun, you wind up as bottom dog.
• The human spirit is a dull instrument, and often we're no better at figuring out how to take care of ourselves than the lowest worm in the ground. Whatever else I've been, I've never let myself be that worm. I've jumped, I've galloped, I've soared, and no matter how many times I've crashed back to earth, I've always picked myself up and tried again.
• To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
• I've done my best, but sometimes a man's best isn't good enough.
• Only out of stubbornness are great things born.
• How could you know unless you tried?
• You couldn't just blunder in and hope for the best.
• Love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another.
• If death is everywhere, what difference does it make where you go?
• Such is the way with dogs. They might not always understand the nuances of their masters' thoughts, but they feel what they feel.
• What good was a home if you didn't feel safe in it?
• That's the trouble with young ones. They might mean well, but they don't have any power.
• Not all stories have happy endings.
• The world was filled with such wonders, and it was a sad state of affairs when a man spent his time worrying about the wrong things.
• Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get.
• You didn't turn your back on a person for letting you down just once--not after a lifetime of friendship, you didn't and especially not if there were extenuating circumstances.
• There was much to be thankful for, and much life still to be lived.

1/8/2011--2:15 pm