The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King

• There were all sorts of things to wonder about.
• You never see all that you see.
• Some of what you don't see in that glance you'll see afterwards, in the eye of your memory.  The difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.
• To act in a situation one does not understand is to invite the most terrible consequences.
• Names were secret things, full of power.
• Don't ignore your suspicions.
• His first impulse was to simply tear it off, like Clark Kent while Lois Lane was tied to a railroad track or something, but that was no good in real life; sooner or later you had to explain those missing buttons.
• Art imitates life and life imitates art.
• For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer.  Our lives are like these things I build.  Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.
• It's up to men to build things, paisan.  It's up to God to blow them down.
• The best course was the safest one.
• It was perhaps fitting to kill a despicable man with a despicable weapon.
• There are people who need people to need them.
• Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies:  with him weak enough to lay blame.
• I don't discuss philosophy.  I don't study history.  All I know is what's past is past, and what's ahead is ahead.
• What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.
• I guess whether or not logic figures in all depends on what you want to believe.
• Sometimes love actually did conquer all.
• Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
• One fool knows another.
• Control the things you can control.  Let everything else take a flying fuck at you, and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.
• We all die in time.  It's not just the world that moves on.

3/2/2013

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

• He would keep going until something changed, and if nothing changed, he would keep going, anyway.
• You will not see what you do not look for.
• If given a knife and a hand in which to hold it, the mind would eventually eat itself.  Not because it wanted to; because it did not want to.
• There had always been murder in the world, but telling himself so was no comfort.
• Sooner or later, if there isn't a turncoat, the people make one.
• When traitors are called heroes (and heroes traitors), dark times must have fallen.
• There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the same place--upon the killing ground.
• Time's the thief of memory.
• The only real beauty is order and love and light.
• In the end there was only ka.
• Boys must put on their fathers' pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back on their hangers; it was like that.  The father pretends he doesn't notice the new way the pants are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under their noses.
• How we make large circles in earth for ourselves.  Around we go, back to the start and the start is there again:  resumption, which was ever the curse of daylight.
• There are other worlds than these.
• He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself.  Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.
• The finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
• New knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries
• The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size.  Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size.
• Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
• If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for a race of gnats among an infinitude of race of gnats?  Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space?  And if He does see...what must the nature of such a God be?  Where does He live?  How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
• Only equals speak the truth.

2/14/2013

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

• Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?
• The word "dying" was not synonymous with "useless."
• I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough.
• I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died, which I figured was my natural fate.
• Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.
• Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.
• Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.
• Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.
• Dying is only one thing to be sad over.  Living unhappily is something else.
• The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves.  We're teaching the wrong things.  And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.  Create your own.
• Life is a series of pulls back and forth.  You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.  Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.  You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.  A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band.  And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
• Love wins.  Love always wins.
• So many people walk around with a meaningless life.  They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important.  This is because they're chasing the wrong things.  The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
• If you really want it, then you'll make your dream happen.
• He couldn't understand why both sides didn't simply communicate with each other and solve their problems.
• Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
• The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
• Why are we embarrassed by silence?  What comfort do we find in all the noise?
• I give myself a good cry if I need it.  But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.
• How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity.
•  Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.  And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too--even when you're in the dark.  Even when you're falling.
• There's a better approach.  To know you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time.  That's better.  That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you're living.
• Do what the Buddhists do.  Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, 'Is today the day?  Am I ready?  Am I doing all I need to do?  Am I being the person I want to be?'
• Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
• Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking.  We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.
• Even I don't know what 'spiritual development' really means.  But I do know we're deficient in some way.  We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don't satisfy us.  The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.
• There is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family.  If you don't have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don't have much at all.  Love is so supremely important.
• Without love, we are birds with broken wings.
• If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.
• Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent.
• Detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you.  On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully.  That's how you are able to leave it.
• Take any emotion--love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness.  If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid.  You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief.  You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.  But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely.  You know what pain is.  You know what love is.  You know what grief is.  And only then can you say, 'All right.  I have experienced that emotion.  I recognize that emotion.  Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'
• Turn on the faucet.  Wash yourself with the emotion.  It won't hurt you.  It will only help.  If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, "All right, it's just fear, I don't have to let it control me.  I see it for what it is."
• The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads--none of us ever got enough of that.  We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of--unconditional love, unconditional attention.  Most of us didn't get enough.
• I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great.  All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves.  
• And in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise.  They have very little understanding about life.  Who wants to live every day when you don't know what's going on?  When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy--and you believe them!  It's such nonsense.
• It's very simple.  As you grow, you learn more.  If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two.  Aging is not just decay, you know.  It's growth.  It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
• If you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back.  You want to go forward.  You want to see more, do more.  You can't wait until sixty-five.
• It is impossible for the old not to envy the young.  But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that.
• You have to find what's good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now.  Looking back makes you competitive.  And, age is not a competitive issue.
• How can I be envious of where you are--when I've been there myself?
• We put our values in the wrong things.  And it leads to very disillusioned lives.
• We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country.  Do you know how they brainwash people?  They repeat something over and over.  And that's what we do in this country.  Owning things is good.  More money is good.  More property is good.  More commercialism is good.  More is good.  More is good.  We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise.  The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.
• You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for a sense of comradeship.
• When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.
• There's big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need.  You need food, you want a chocolate sundae.  You have to be honest with yourself.  You don't need the latest sports car, you don't need the biggest house.  The truth is, you don't get satisfaction from those things.  You know what really gives you satisfaction?  Offering others what you have to give.
• This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.
• If you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it.  They will look down at you anyhow.  And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it.  They will only envy you.  Status will get you nowhere.  Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.
• Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.
• He looked you straight in the eye, and he listened as if you were the only person in the world.  How much better would people get along if their first encounter each day were like this--instead of a grumble from a waitress or a bus driver or a boss?
• I believe in being fully present.  That means you should be with the person you're with.
• So many people with far smaller problems are so self-absorbed, their eyes glaze over if you speak for more than thirty seconds.  They already have something else in mind--a friend to call, a fax to send, a lover they're daydreaming about.  They only snap back to full attention when you finish talking, at which point they say "Uh-huh" or "Yeah, really" and fake their way back to the moment.  Part of the problem is that everyone is in such a hurry.  People haven't found meaning in their lives, so they're running all the time looking for it.  They think the next car, the next house, the next job.  Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.
• Once you start running, I said, it's hard to slow yourself down.
•  In this culture, it's so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that.  But the poor kids today, either they're too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced.  They don't know what they want in a partner.  They don't know who they are themselves--so how can they know who they're marrying?
• I've learned this much about marriage.  You get tested.  You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don't.
• There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage.  If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  And if you don't have a common set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  Your values must be alike.  And the biggest one of those values, your belief in the importance of your marriage.
• I thought about how much time we spend trying to shape our bodies, lifting weights, crunching sit-ups, and in the end, nature takes it away from us anyhow.
• People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does.  That's what our economy does.  Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them.  And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself.  You start making money a god.  It is all part of this culture.
• Here's what I mean by building your own little sub-culture.  I don't mean you disregard every rule of your community.  I don't go around naked, for example.  I don't run through red lights.  The little things, I can obey.  But the big things--how we think, what we value--those you must choose yourself.  You can't let anyone--or any society--determine those for you.
• No matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness.  We don't see what we could be.  We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.  But if you're surrounded by people who say 'I want mine now,' you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.
• If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.
• We all have the same beginning--birth--and we all have the same end--death.  So how different can we be?  Invest in the human family.  Invest in people.  Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
• Don't let go too soon, but don't hang on too long.
• Be compassionate.  And take responsibility for each other.  If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.
• Forgive yourself before you die.  Then forgive others.
• You can't get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.
• Death ends a life, not a relationship.
• There is no formula to relationships.  They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.
• Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.
• Pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.
• None of us can undo what we've done, or relive a life already recorded.

1/25/2013

Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich

• Sometimes bits and pieces of seeemingly benign information turned out to be useful.
• What was important was that I look like a doormat at appropriate moments.
• Doing anything (no matter how tedious and insignificant) is better than doing nothing.
• It's funny how people form alliances around the common denominator of simply needing a friend.
• Sometimes paranoia is justified.
• Plums don't do Valium.  We mainline cheesecake.

1/15/2013

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

• Money sharpens the memory.
• Time passes slowly when you are actually doing something.
• Some voices stay in your mind.  Even in the dark people are recognized.
• You can crab over the morning paper and kick the shins of the guy in the next seat at the movies and feel mean and discouraged and sneer at the politicians, but there are a lot of nice people in the world just the same.
• All crooks are gamblers, more or less, and all gamblers are superstitious--more or less.
• A guy can't stay honest if he wants to.  That's what's the matter with this country.  He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does.  You gotta play the game dirty or you don't eat.
• The trouble with cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something they didn't have before.
• An empire can fall in a minute.
• A lie with a nod is still a lie, but it's an easy lie.

11/24/2012

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

• The world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal also knew how to kill.
• Gods make uncertain allies at best.
• What a man sows on his name day, he reaps throughout the year.
• A lady's armor is courtesy.
• Schemes are like fruit, they require a certain ripening.
• Even in the midst of war, certain decencies needed to be observed.
• Swearing don't make it true.
• There's no shame in fear, what matters is how we face it.
• Even the wisest man never knew whether his next harvest would be the last.
• Was there ever a war where only one side bled?
• Power resides where men believe it resides.
• He who hurries through life hurries to his grave.
• How can I lose something I have never owned?
• Hard places breed hard men, and hard men rule the world.
• Every morning brings a new day, much like the old.
• A man agrees with god as a raindrop with the storm.
• No man should live longer than his teeth.
• There are ghosts everywhere.  We carry them with us wherever we go.
• When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.
• The best lies contain within them nuggets of truth, enough to give a listener pause.
• The ones who look the most suspicious are likely innocent.  It's the ones who look innocent I need to beware.
• The gods made our bodies as well as our souls.  They give us voices, so we might worship them with song.  They give us hands, so we might build them temples.  And they give us desire, so we might mate and worship them in that way.
• When we speak of the morrow nothing is ever certain.
• I would sooner be up, though the world be dark, than lie restless abed, fretting on tasks undone.
• Nothing was simple and little was true.
• Searching is not finding.
• Is a secret still a secret if everyone knows it?
• Paint stripes on a toad, he does not become a tiger.
• One day she would allow herself to be less than strong.  But not today.  It could not be today.
• No one has ever died of restlessness, but rashness is another matter.
• In the songs all knights are gallant, all maids are beautiful, and the sun is always shining.
• Better to die free than live a slave.
• The wide world is full of people wanting to help.  Would that some could find the courage to help themselves.
• Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him.
• Fools believe in foolish things.
• What boy does not secretly wish to find hidden powers in himself?
• So long as there was magic, anything could happen.
• If you step in a nest of snakes, does it matter which one bites you first?
• A man should never refuse to taste a peach.  He may never get the chance again.
• Sorcery is the sauce fools spoon over failure to hide the flavor of their own incompetence.
• A battle is not a war.
• It seems to me that it might be easier for one man to find two hundred than for two hundred to find one.
• No victory is without cost.
• Vows made at sword point are not valid.
• Have you ever considered that too many answers are the same as no answer at all?
• You served him valiantly, but when you seek to follow him into the earth, you serve no one.
• The longer you remain in one place, the easier it will be for your enemies to find you.
• A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good.  Each should have its own reward.
• Some men believe everything and some nothing.
• Some lights cast more than one shadow.
• It seems to me that most men are grey.
• If half of an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion.  A man is good, or he is evil.
• The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.
• The man who kills his own blood is cursed forever in the sight of gods and men.
• How can I do my duty if I do not know where it lies?
• Only cowards fight with fire.
• If you can't protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can.
• A woman's life is nine parts mess to one part magic...and the parts that look like magic often turn out to be messiest of all.
• In formal battle, discipline is more important than courage.
• Men fight more fiercely for a king who shares their peril than one who hides behind his mother's skirts.
• Will holding it secret in your heart make it any less true?  If you never tell, never speak of it, will it become only a dream, less than a dream, a nightmare half-remembered?
• Forbid her anything and it became her heart's desire.
• People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.
• Sooner madness than defeat.  Defeat is death and shame.
• If I'm to sit here like a stump, I had as well paint a target on my breastplate.
• You don't feel your wounds then, or the ache in your back from the weight of the armor, or the sweat running down into your eyes.  You stop feeling, you stop thinking, you stop being you, there is only the fight, the foe, this man and then the next and the next and the next, and you know they are afraid and tired but you're not, you're alive, and death is all around you but their swords move so slowly, you can dance through them laughing.
• Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray, stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day.  Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray, soothe the wrath and tame the fury, teach us all a kinder way.
• Wishing it were otherwise will not make it so.
• Terrible times breed terrible things.

1/8/2013

Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

• There are things to be learned even from the dead.
• It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your cups.
• Can a man still be brave if he's afraid? That is the only time a man can be brave.
• The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.
• A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.
• Easy to say, and harder to do.
• Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.
• Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.
• Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.
• Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.
• I will fight that battle when the enemy appears on the field.
• The gods mock the prayers of kings and cowherds alike.
• A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.
• Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.
• Every flight begins with a fall.
• It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.
• A man must make his own choices. They earned the silver. How they spend it is no concern of mine.
• There's much to be said for taking people unawares. You never know what you might learn.
• Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side?
• Let them see that their words can cut you, and you'll never be free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make it your own. Then they can't hurt you with it anymore.
• If a man paints a target on his chest, he should expect that sooner or later someone will loose an arrow at him.
• We all need to be mocked from time to time, lest we start to take ourselves too seriously.
• A lord needed to eat with his men, if he hoped to keep them.
• The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends.  It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.
• Minds are like swords, I do fear.  The old ones go to rust.
• Grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.
• All men carry murder in their hearts.
• Put not your trust in spiders.
• There's no honor in beating a fallen foe.
• The world was full of cravens who pretended to be heroes; it took a queer sort of courage to admit to cowardice.
• Silence sometimes yielded more than questions.
• Only a man who's been burned knows what hell is truly like.
• Every hurt is a lesson, and every lesson makes you better.
• All halls lead somewhere.  Where there is a way in, there is a way out.
• Even the finest of jugglers cannot keep a hundred balls in the air forever.
• When you find yourself in bed with an ugly woman, the best thing to do is close your eyes and get on with it.  Waiting won't make the maid any prettier.  Kiss her and be done with it.
• The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.
• Some secrets are safer kept hidden.  Some secrets are too dangerous to share, even with those you love and trust.
• Love is sweet, but it cannot change a man's nature.
• Life is not a song, sweetling.  You may learn that one day to your sorrow.
• Sleep is the great healer.
• A true man does what he will, not what he must.
• Even the truest knight cannot protect a king against himself.
• A bruise is a lesson, and each lesson makes us better.
• Watching is not seeing.
• The heart lies and the head plays tricks with us, but the eyes see true.
• Fear cuts deeper than swords.
• Blood runs truer than oaths.
• Some commands are more easily given than obeyed.
• A man who won't listen can't hear.
• That was the trouble with the clans; they had an absurd notion that every man's voice should be heard in council, so they argued about everything, endlessly.
• All men must swallow the sour with the sweet.
• There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.
• As we sin, so do we suffer.  If that's true, why is it always the innocents who suffer most?
• A child sees an obstacle, and his first thought is to run around it or knock it down.  A lord must learn that sometimes words can accomplish what swords cannot.
• Some truths did not bear saying, and some lies were necessary.
• We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love.  That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.
• Times may change, but men do not.
• A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear.  And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it.
• A dead man is beyond fear.
• Fear can fever a man's mind and give him queer thoughts.
• A man who sees nothing has no use for his eyes.
• 
  

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

• Somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail.
• There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
• The trouble with the world was that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said if everybody would study science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble there was.
• I think you'll find that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.
• Any scientist who couldn't explain o an eight-year old what he was doing was a charlatan.
• We'd all do well to start over again, preferably with kindergarten.
• New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
• Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
• Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.
• Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.
• People taking the last rites have a way of dying on cue.
• I'm grateful for things that work. Not many things do work, you know.
• The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
• My God--life! Who can understand even one little minute of it? "Don't try," he said. "Just pretend you understand."
• Maturity, the way I understand it, is knowing what your limitations are.
• People are unkind sometimes without meaning to be.
• I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.
• It is never a mistake to say goodbye.
• When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
• Without accurate records of the past, how can men and women be expected to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?
• Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.
• Think of what paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.
• Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

1/29/2012

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

• You're going to die and leave me alone.
• It's not news that I'm going to die one of these days. You are too. This is not news, Sweet Pea.
• Sex heals, anxiety kills.
• Her therapist says I am afraid of stridency. She says I am addicted to sweetness. I do not understand why it is an addiction simply because I do my best to think pretty pink and blue thoughts.
• Can you reclaim that free-girl smile, or is it like virginity--once you lose it, that's it?
• You must meet each person's eyes while clinking glasses in a toast. Otherwise, the ritual has no meaning, it's just pure show.
• What do you mean, you "don't know how to love"? Do you think any of us know how to love?! Do you think anybody would ever do anything if they waited until they knew how to love?! Do you think that babies would ever get made or meals cooked or crops planted or books written or what Goddamn-have-you? Do you think people would even get out of the bed in the morning if they waited until they knew how to love? You have had too much therapy. Or not enough. God knows how to love, Kiddo. The rest of us are only good actors.
• If God hides in details, then maybe so do we.
• Who has time to write memoirs? I'm still living my memoirs.
• You can't figure me out. I can't figure me out. It's life, Sidda. You don't figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.
• To me, smells are like an invisible person that a lot of people forget is even there. I would rather lose my eyes than my sense of smell.
• She wanted to soak the words "time management" out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down into the uncharted beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.
• I just know that somehow everything the four of us do is important. I believe that years from now people are going to want to know about us.
• Is jealousy a gene passed down like blonde hair or brown eyes?
• You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is? Like when you see a couple on the dance floor who really know how to waltz. You want to wait till the music stops, and then run up and congratulate them.
• There is more that is right with me than there is wrong with me.
• If you wept, sooner or later you'd laugh.
• I'm just going to think me some pretty pink and blue thoughts.
• Uncountable the number of breaths I've taken for granted in my life.
• There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.
• Vivi worked hard to make every birthday a good one. It was as though she had made a covenant with herself that she would do anything within her power not to let a birthday go bad.
• Use everything in your life to create your art.
• All God's children have different ideas about healing.
• God don't like ugly, Mes Petites Choux. Ça va? No matter what they'll try to tell you, Bébés! God don't make ugly, and God don't like ugly. Le Bon Dieu is a god of loveliness, and don't yall forget it!
• Life is short, but it is wide. This too shall pass.
• Say there is no truth. Say there are only scraps that we feebly try to sew together.
• I try to believe that God doesn't give you more than one little piece of the story at once. You know, the story of your life. Otherwise your heart would crack wider than you could handle. He only cracks it enough so you can still walk, like someone wearing a cast. But you've still got a crack running up your side, big enough for a sapling to grow out of. Only no one sees it. Nobody sees it. Everybody thinks you're one whole piece, and so they treat you maybe not so gentle as they would if they could see that crack.
• There is no escape from our mothers. I don't even want to escape anymore. Maybe we aren't meant to escape our mothers.
• Sometime the bébé she has to get sick to get well.
• The only way any of us are going to stay out of The Betty is to talk.
• In the land of the blind, the nearsighted man is king.
• The married state is a road which passes over hilly regions. You accepted a life of duty and responsibilities when you received the sacrament of matrimony.
• We have to keep these men in the dark, you know, or the whole world would fall to pieces.
• Friends are supposed to act like harbor boats--let you know if you're off course.
• Maybe people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.
• One breath at a time, Pal, it's the only way.
• Words lead to deeds. They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness.
• The alligators can get you at any age, Buddy. But the worst thing you can do is freeze.
• We are each flawed, and in search of solace.
• My mother's love is not perfect. My mother's love is good enough. My lover's love is good enough. Maybe I am good enough.
• The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts?
• Sometimes lost treasures can be reclaimed.
• We're all hanging by a thread in the canyon of doom. We're all each other's keepers.

1/13/2012

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