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