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

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

• There is always a gap between intention and action.
• Nothing in this world happens by chance.
• Suicide demands that people think of themselves first and of others later.
• Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.
• No one can judge. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering or the total absence of meaning in their lives.
• It's best to accept life as it really is and not as I imagined it to be.
• I want to continue being crazy, living my life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be.
• She had learned early that whenever a new situation presented itself, you had to remain cool and distant.
• Real love changes and grows with time and discovers new ways of expressing itself.
• She didn't struggle, and so she didn't grow.
• People never learn anything by being told; they have to find out for themselves.
• All of us, one way or another, are insane.
• Death had freed her from the fear of dying.
• No one should let themselves get used to anything.
• The meaninglessness of life was no one's fault but mine.
• Stop thinking all the time that you're in the way, that you're bothering the person next to you. If people don't like it, they can complain. And if they don't have the courage to complain, that's their problem.
• I don't think you should leave this life without knowing how far you can go.
• Everyone has an unusual story to tell.
• Good or bad, an idea only exists when someone tries to put it into practice.
• God was there, and yet people believed they still had to go on looking, because it seemed too simple to accept that life was an act of faith.
• Basically everything that happens in our life is our fault and ours alone.
• If you live, God will live with you. If you refuse to run his risks, he'll retreat to that distant heaven and be merely a subject for philosophical speculation.
• You've got nothing to lose. Many people don't allow themselves to love, precisely because of that, because there are a lot of things at risk, a lot of future and a lot of past. In your case, there is only the present.
• I need to run the risk of being alive.
• Normality is merely a matter of consensus; that is, a lot of people think something is right, and so that thing becomes right.
• Diplomacy is also the art of postponing decisions until the problems resolve themselves.
• The danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort.

12/28/2010--11:35 pm

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer

• No perspective is ever really trivial.
• There were some things out there scarier than I'd imagined.

6/24/2010--7:32 pm

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

• If you'd had your way then, there wouldn't be much chance for second thoughts now.
• No justice system can ever be free of human error.
• There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.
• Without a surrounding context of harmony, disharmony was meaningless and uninteresting.
• He was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all.
• Perhaps every century there was an exception or two to be made.
• Sometimes the work was hard, and you had to do whatever experience had taught you was most effective.
• If it's okay to be a transvestite, then it's okay for a racist to be one. What's not okay is to be a racist.
• The best ideas were the ones that survived and were strengthened by intelligent opposition.
• Love was a greater force than spite.
• A letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future.

12/22/2010