One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

• They knew everything about what was going on in their little world.
• I listened to her, because I loved her.
• I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and everyday any longer.
• If you are different from a person everyone agrees is wonderful, it means you are somehow wrong.
• She should never be disappointed by failure because failure was all you could expect.
• The important thing is that I'm all right.
• I'd read for hours. I think in the back of my mind I thought it would be a substitute for not going to college.
• It's a mistake to base your entire life on one man's approval.
• I don't have the energy for anger.
• I'm the kind of person who likes to know things.
• It's the weak link in just about every book I've ever read. They set up a very smart, very thoughtful, very nice character, and then have him fall in love with someone that anyone could tell is a horrible human being.
• She was not yet ready to let her child be the grown-up in the house. She had had one great calling, as a mother, and she would not be forced from the field.
• There's no such thing as being too hard on yourself.
• Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you, God, for everything.
• Everyone deals with bad stuff in their own way.
• Why should she have to sit by herself and look at pictures of her life when she could have the real thing? Why should she sit around conjuring up her memories of your life together when she could be with you making real memories?
• Sometimes people need to hear things said out loud before they become real.
• I have the right to be treated as a living human being until I die.
• We cry to give voice to our pain.
• I refuse to believe that keeping your grief bottled up makes you feel better than crying.
• It's more important that you take advantage of the time you have than that you worry about how much time there is.
• There is no good way to tell people that they are lucky in their relationships.
• You make concessions when you're married a long time that you don't believe you'll ever make when you're beginning. You say to yourself when you're young, oh, I wouldn't tolerate this or that or the other thing, you say love is the most important thing in the world and there's only one kind of love and it makes you feel different than you feel the rest of the time, like you're all lit up. But time goes by and you've slept together a thousand nights and smelled like spit up when babies are sick and seen your body droop and get soft. And some nights you say to yourself, it's not enough, I won't put up with another minute. And then the next morning you wake up and the kitchen smells like coffee and the children have their hair all brushed and the birds are eating out of the feeder and you look at your husband and he's not the person you used to think he was but he's your life. The house and the children and so much of what you do is built around him and your life, too, your history. If you take him out it's like cutting his face out of all pictures, there's a big hole and it's ugly. It would ruin everything. It's more than love, it's more important than love.
• You can be hard, and you can be judgmental, and with those two things alone you can make a mess of your life the likes of which you won't believe.
• All the things we don't say, all the words we swallow, and it makes nothing but trouble. I want to talk before I die. I want to be the one who gets to say things, who gets to think the deep thoughts.
• It's so much easier, to learn to love what you have instead of yearning always for what you're missing, or what you imagine you're missing. It's so much more peaceful.
• There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat.
• A good housewife makes a happy home.
• Second-rate poetry is better than no poetry at all.
• Knowing that you're typical doesn't go a long way toward making you feel better in your day-to-day life.
• It takes your entire life to get over some of the people you've loved, and some you never get over.
• If your cat is up a tree, then you want to be nice to police officers. If you are under suspicion in a murder case, you do not. They are on the other side. They are not interested in the search for truth. They are interested in the search for you.
• Everyone makes up their little stories and then they wonder why their own lives aren't like that. It makes life so much simpler if they can get rid of all the loose ends.
• I just want to feel something.
• Wasn't your image of your father always just refracted through your mother's belief in what he was? Wasn't he really just her creation?
• Be just, and fear not.
• Authority must earn the right to lead, and we owe ourselves the right to refuse to follow if they do not.
• It's so much easier to know just how you feel about things, what you believe, when you're writing it on paper than when you really have to do anything about it or live with it.
• It's all anyone wants, really, to make life simple.
• Death is so strange, so mysterious, so sad, that we want to blame someone for it.
• I realized that, while I would never be my mother nor have her life, the lesson she had left me was that it was possible to love and care for a man and still have at your core a strength so great that you never even needed to put it on display.
• Have you ever had the feeling that you had things all figured out and then suddenly you find yourself back to square one?

2/15/2007

Family--The Ties That Bind...And Gag! by Erma Bombeck

• After the land of make-believe came reality, and people who lived there didn't seem to have a whole lot of fun.
• The man who held your hand tenderly through sixteen hours of labor with your first child could charge you $135,000 for landing on Park Place without a trace of remorse.
• I promise by all that is holy, I will never observe another Christmas without meaning.
• Friends are "annuals" that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms. Family is a "perennial" that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect. There's a place in the garden for both of them.
• If a home is a man's castle...let him clean it.
• There are two things a woman should do by herself...give birth and shop.
• We have an entire generation of kids growing up who have been told that work must be "fun, relevant, and meaningful." The hell it is. It's discipline, competition, and repetition.
• I learned that he may love several wives, embrace several cars, be true to more than one political philosophy, and be equally committed to several careers, but he will have only one comfortable chair in his life. I learned it will be an ugly chair. It will match nothing in the entire house. It will never wear out.

3/2/2006

Forever... by Judy Blume

• You can't excel at everything. I'm realistic about myself. I think a person has to be.
• People who come from happy homes, with parents who really care about each other tend to have good marriages themselves.
• You can't have a decent relationship without honesty.
• Can you really love someone you've seen just nineteen times in your life?
• Spending a lot of time together can end a romance faster than anything else.
• The future will take care of itself.
• You have to be sure you can handle the situation before you jump into it.
• Reading and doing are not the same at all.
• We grow from our experiences.

12/25/2006

The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield

• True intelligence does not reside in the brain, but in the hands.
• In the final analysis, aren't all our diseases mental?
• You could change the universe, or your own at any rate, by transmuting it mentally.
• When a man's foes are worthy, every match is at championship level.
• I believe that each of us possesses, inside ourselves, one true Authentic Swing that is ours alone. It is folly to try to teach us another, or mold us to some ideal version of the perfect swing. Each player possesses only that one swing that he was born with, that swing which existed within him before he ever picked up a club. Like the statue of David, our Authentic Swing already exists, concealed within the stone, so to speak.
• I believe this is the reason for the endless fascination of golf. The game is a metaphor for the soul's search for its true ground and identity.
• We enter onto this material plane, as Wordsworth said, 'not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.' In other words, already possessing a highly refined and individuated soul. Our job here is to recall that soul and become it. To form a union with it, a yoga as they say in India.
• We cannot overcome by force of will.
• For in the end, grace comes from God, from the Authentic Self.
• The swing is never learned. It's remembered.
• What good ever came of human beings facing one another in conflict?
• What is ever gained by 'defeating' others?
• What statement can you make about what is real or important?
• So you choose not to act. As if by that choice, you will cause no harm.
• Life is action. Even choosing not to act, we act.
• There can be no cheating in the dimension in which the Self resides. There every action inexorably produces its result, every thought its consequence.
• The rain falls, with no though of watering the land. The clouds roll, not seeking to bring shade. They simply do. And we must too.
• Why did God give us a brain if not to think?
• Don't they, the animals, seem closer to God than we? Don't they seem automatically tuned to His will, guided flawlessly by instinct?
• The Knowing is everything. It is the Knowing alone that survives the death of the body. You are your Knowing.
• In sensed that every aspect of the gull's life, of the storm's life, of the planet's itself, was play. Hunting and killing included. It was all play. Only we humans broke this natural law.
• There's no tonic like youth for a quick recovery!
• The human being at his current level is incapable of perceiving Reality, except in rare ecstatic bursts. In earlier eras, men could hold that consciousness longer. In future ages, they will again.
• He had destroyed himself by his own arrogance. With his own hand he had crushed the Grace that had been granted him
• You are never alone.
• Those who seek lesser teachers go unto them.
• Play is the activity most pleasing to me. Because it is authentic.
• A day will come for you when play becomes torment.
• How can any of us know another's grief?

1/9/2007

Holes by Louis Sachar

• Whenever anything went wrong, it felt good to be able to blame someone.
• I learn from failure.
• Everyone makes mistakes. You may have done some bad things, but that doesn't mean you're a bad kid.
• He was just a fifteen-year old kid, and "eternity" didn't seem much longer than a week from Tuesday.
• Don't laugh at people's dreams.
• Nothing in life is easy. But that's no reason to give up. You'll be surprised what you can accomplish if you set your mind to it. After all, you only have one life, so you should try to make the most of it.
• The rattlesnake would be a lot more dangerous if it didn't have a rattle.
• If he didn't talk about it, then maybe it didn't happen.
• We're all equal under the eyes of God.
• Sound travels a great distance across a barren wasteland.
• In a land of nothingness, any little thing seemed unusual.
• When you spend your whole life living in a hole, the only way you can go is up.
• He thought only about each step, and not the impossible task that lay before him.
• Stanley could hear his heart beat. Each beat told him was still alive, at least for one more second.

12/29/2006

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

• Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.
• Everybody goes through phases and all, don't they?
• Some people you shouldn't kid, even if they deserve it.
• That's the whole trouble. When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think.
• Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.
• Certain thing they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.
• If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?
• If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.
• If she was decent enough to let you get sexy with her all the time, you at least shouldn't talk about her that way.
• Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake--especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all.
• Don't you think there's a time and place for everything?
• The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
• You're a student--whether the idea appeals to you or not. You're in love with knowledge.
• You're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.
• I'm not trying to tell you that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world. It's not so. But I do say that educated and scholarly men, if they're brilliant and creative to begin with--which, unfortunately, is rarely the case--tend to leave infinitely more valuable records behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts through to the end. And--most important--nine times out of then they have more humility than the unscholarly thinker.
• It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible.
• You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.
• How do you know what you're going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don't.

3/16/2007

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

• Daddy's anger had left her far away and careless
• My parents' fights just meant they loved each other in a noisy way.
• I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.
• The smile you send out returns to you.
• Idle please disguises itself as permanent happiness.
• I wondered if the whole world wasn't crazy.
• The sanctity of the confessional applied more to murderers than kids.
• That's what life's all about. Climbing out onto the airplane wing and jumping off.
• You cook your own goose when you limit yourself.
• You can be two things if you are a woman. Betty Crocker or a floozy. Just remember your place--even if it kills you.
• Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet.
• He was always full of promises. He had wrecked my whole life.
• I'm not your free show!
• Teachers! There were two types: the ones who treated you like dirt and the ones who were all over you with their Geiger counters of hope.
• All the dead bolts and pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.
• I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.
• They assumed they were better than you just because they knew their own routine.
• You were the same person, no matter what state you happened to be stuck breathing in.
• Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
• I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.
• If you played with fire, you were going to get burned.
• It was funny how my high-school education was turning out to be more useful after the fact than while they were putting me through it.
• Everything's relative. Look at the big picture.
• We owe it to our generation to get political!
• Pain would be better than not feeling anything.
• God has his reasons that you and me don't understand.
• I wanted to talk to someone, some person I hadn't failed.
• I tried to recall any other time when he had apologized to me. For over three years it had been the other way around.
• Disagreements don't alter a mother's love for her daughter. Nothing does. Nothing alters that.
• The trouble with going underwater was that you had to come back up.
• The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist.
• Who was I to criticize someone else's choices? Who was I to judge?
• I don't see it as a matter of choice. Your feelings are facts.
• You create your own future.
• You build happiness out of insight and good habits.
• Show me a childhood without some sort of violence. Show me a painless childhood.
• You orchestrate happiness--you work at it. You don't catch it as it hurls toward you like a football.
• I want to live in a place where I can have a bedroom-door lock. Where I can be my real age and not have to pretend some man is my mother.
• Fate doesn't give warranties like Sears Roebuck.
• If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.
• I wondered if I hadn't made a crucial mistake, obvious to everyone but me.
• You didn't telephone people if your new life was working out.
• Different strokes for different folks.
• Everyone in the world kept secrets.
• But the Lord Almight doesn't give out any promises just because you love someone. Love only gets you so far.
• If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy like Grandma.
• Repression doesn't make it any easier. It just wastes energy.
• Foul language is part of your armor of defense.
• Not using birth control was a decision to have a baby.
• Men scare too easily.
• Without the pictures seducing you, TV was just a powerless talking ghost.
• Being complimented felt the same as being accused.
• No couple is happy all the time.
• Writing is a lot like dreaming. There's a subconscious connection. Once someone intrudes, it's like trying to go back to sleep to finish your dream.
• His words had burned me more times than they'd soothed me. I cautioned myself not to be taken in by this verbal Noxzema.
• Death angered loved ones because it made them feel powerless.
• You sit around feelin' sorry for yourself and you're dead. Sittin' on your ass can get to be a disease worse than what you got.
• Life's a shit sandwich, but only if you're a shithead.
• People don't fall so neatly into the categories you put them in--heroes and villains, unfettered and--fettered?
• You just shouldn't make promises you don't intend to keep.
• The whole world would work right if people just tried being an inch and a half nicer to each other.
• My whole life used to throb like a toothache.
• The secret is to just settle for the shape your life takes. Instead of, you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.
• Life's absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining.
• Love was always the thing that did that--smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
• Good catches are a mixed blessing.
• I just don't believe in happily-ever-after. It's a crock of shit! I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you...happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit.
• People waste their happiness--that's what makes me sad. Everyone's so scared to be happy.
• Accept what people offer. Take their love.
• Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
• Whatever prices I've paid, whatever sorrows I shoulder, well, I have blessings, too.

12/19/2006