Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

• When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.
• I do a good job of blocking painful, unneccessary things from my memory.
• Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs.
• It was hard to believe that someone so beautiful could be real. I was afraid that he might disappear in a sudden puff of smoke, and I would wake up.
• I decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly.
• I wasn't going out without taking someone with me.
• If leaving is the right thing to do, then I'll hurt myself to keep from hurting you.
• I like the night. Without the dark, we'd never see the stars.
• I had to keep reminding myself that I'd made my choice, and I wasn't going back on it.
• Even the strongest of us fall off the wagon, don't we?
• There's nothing like an unsolved mystery to keep you up at night.
• Human memories fade.
• The future isn't set in stone. Things change.
• If I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it.
• Isn't it supposed to be like this? The glory of first love, and all that. It's incredible, isn't it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?
• Just because we've been...dealt a certain hand...it doesn't mean that we can't choose to rise above--to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted.
• Love and lust don't always keep the same company.
• There are exceptions to every rule.
• Memories were better than any reality.
• It's possible to take bravery to the point where it becomes insanity.

3/16/2009 12:24am

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger

• I tried to forget that this was my life, the reason I'd spent four long years memorizing poems and examining prose, the result of good grades and lots of kissing up.
• I was reasonably sure that I had reached a new moral low--what was worrisome was that I'd sunk to it so naturally.
• I lied quickly, remembering a Cosmo article I'd read that had exhorted me to "keep it light and airy and happy" when talking to a new guy because most "normal" guys didn't respond so well to hard-bitten cynicism.
• Don't talk about yourself too much, don't dominate the conversation, get him comfortable enough to chat about his favorite and most familiar topic: him.
• She loved anyone and anything that didn't love her back, so long as it made her feel alive.
• It was just when it came time to look in the mirror that everyone genuinely saw a wildebeest staring back.
• She's lucky she's got you for a friend. Otherwise she'd be all alone in the world.
• I could only imagine how much Miranda was hating being addressed as "ma'am," which, as everyone knows, connotes old lady all the way.
• If she didn't think you did a great job, she'd have gotten rid of you already.
• FASHION IS NOT FOR ADVERTISING YOUR FAVE SEX ACTS ON YOUR SHIRT.
• Everything would just sort itself out if I just stopped worrying so much.
• Any armchair shrink could easily point out that my outward enthusiasm was meant to overcompensate for all that was lacking inwardly.
• Early morning was always preferred because people's makeup would be fresh and their clothes unwrinkled.
• We hung up on good terms, but I couldn't shake the feeling that my own parents were disappointed in me.

3/10/2009--12:11 a.m.

Singing Songs by Meg Tilly

• Cultured and refined people don't call other people fakes or liars.
• I knew you had to have hardships before you became magic.
• You can't spend your day making people feel stupid and then expect them to want to eat lunch with you.
• She knew shutting her eyes wouldn't help. But somehow, there was that belief that if she couldn't see him...then he couldn't see her.
• Never think you're too good for a man. If someone wants to take you out, you go out and count your blessings.
• If there is one thing I can't stand, it's being pitied.
• I could do anything. Anything in the world I set my mind to.

1/4/2009 12:58 pm

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

• Fear only feeble old age and death in bed. Don't forget who you are.
• Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.
• Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist.
• Only peons made excuses for themselves. Never apologize, never explain.
• She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they'd been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T'ang Dynasty.
• She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.
• It was exactly the kind of thing she hated the most, a woman as a man's anything.
• Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July.
• How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?
• Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.
• It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.
• Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind. But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing.
• The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence.
• You are the judge of what is true.
• I've got to believe in something.
• If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.
• Everybody needed to feel love.
• A person didn't need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved.
• After all the fears, the warnings; After all; A woman's mistakes are different from a girl's; They are written by fire on stone; They are a trait and not an error...
• Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
• You never knew when rescue might come.
• Despair was the killer. I had to prepare, hold hope between my palms like the flame of the last match in a long Arctic night.
• At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.
• What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
• You enjoy anything you're good at.
• What's real is always worth it.
• I should know enough by now not to expect anything from life.
• What was the point in just being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.
• Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness.
• When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost.
• Women always put men first. That's how everything got so screwed up.
• I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day, no matter what.
• It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
• She's never where she is. She's only inside her head.
• Certain people should always be lied to.
• I don't think people should fool around with things they don't believe in.
• When you committed suicide, you didn't want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.
• How long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?
• Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy.
• If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away.
• Claire was just tired of seeing her own face in the mirror, it was a code of her failings.
• Perfect was always too much to ask.
• If something is wrong, you can't just turn it to the wall.
• Take my advice. Stay away from all broken people.
• People were just like that. We couldn't even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.
• What was beauty unless you intended to use it, like a hammer, or a key? It was just something for other people to use and admire, or envy, despise. To nail their dreams onto like a picture hanger on a blank wall. And so many girls saying, use me, dream me.
• I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs.
• People just wanted to be loved.
• Everybody left you eventually.
• Without my wounds, who was I?
• I never let anyone touch me.
• My mistake, for anticipating there would be a future, that the dream would just go on and on.
• "Love the One You're With" was the tune life kept forcing on me, and yet there I was, hope fluttering like a bird in my hand.
• You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.
• One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.
• Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good.
• I knew nothing but that was the place to begin.
• I don't have to put my face on every cloud, be the protagonist of every random event.
• I can't remake the world just by willing it so.
• What matters is only oneself and what one creates from what one has learned.
• How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.
• What was a weed, anyway. A plant nobody planted? A seed escaped from a traveler's coat, something that didn't belong? Was it something that grew better than what should have been there? Wasn't it just a word, weed, trailing its judgments. Useless, without value. Unwanted.
• The mind was so thin, barely a spiderweb, with all its fine thoughts, aspirations, and beliefs in its own importance. Watch how easily it unravels, evaporates under the first lick of pain.
• The reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. You could to anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history.
• These days, I had given up trying to understand what was right or wrong, what mattered or didn't.
• You accrued virtue just by doing a good job with whatever you were doing, completely applying yourself to the task at hand.
• Nobody waited for anybody.
• Love. I would ban the word from the vocabulary. Such imprecision. Love, which love, what love? Sentiment, fantasy, longing, lust? Obsession, devouring need? Perhaps the only love that is accurate without qualification is the love of a very young child.
• Love is a bedtime story, a teddy bear, familiar, one eye missing.
• I had to face this, that people left and you didn't see them again.
• Don't turn over rocks if you don't want to see the pale creatures who live under them.
• Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them?
• You had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them.
• There was no such thing as an empty canvas.
• Stand up for myself, beat on the bars until I got what I needed.
• It's the century of the displaced person. You can never go home.
• I hadn't come this far to be left at some river bottom among the wrecked cars.

1/2/2009 12:09 AM

Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

• Can't I even have the privacy of my own soul?
• How is it possible for me to be so miserable and embarrassed and humiliated and beaten and still function, still talk and smile and concentrate?
• I wouldn't intentionally hurt anyone in this whole world. I wouldn't hurt them physically or emotionally, how then can people so consistently do it to me?
• I guess I'll never measure up to anyone's expectations. I surely don't measure up to what I'd like to be.
• I want so much to be someone important.
• Personally I'd like to get a whole new everything, except my books of course, they are part of my life.
• Even now I'm not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I've gotten from books.
• It seems that when something is going good, everything else goes good too.
• I'm party somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other.
• As usual I can't afford a fraction of the things I want.
• It is a woman's place to be long-suffering and patient and toleratnt and understanding.
• Isn't that ghastly and ironic? I'm afraid to live and afraid to die.
• At this stage in my life nothingness is a lot better than somethingness.
• A man's blood soon runs cold when there is no one around to warm it up.
• The garbage that goes with drugs makes the price too goddamned high for anyone to pay.
• She didn't know whether she was running away from something or running to something, but she admitted that deep in her heart she wanted to go home.
• Perhaps it was even right for me to go through all this suffering so that I could be more understanding and tolerant of the rest of humanity.
• But I wonder if I will ever feel completely new again. Or will I spend the rest of my life feeling like a walking disease????
• My room will be my whole universe.
• People can adjust to anything.
• I have this very silly fear that one day I'll be old, without ever having really been young. Do you think life can get by you without your ever seeing it?
• Why is life so difficult? Why can't we just be ourselves and have everyone accept us the way we are?

12/14/2008

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

• People aren't meant to be overly bright in everything.
• There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.
• Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.
• There is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.
• The secret of a good lie is don't overly explain, and throw in one good detail.
• Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't.
• Every little thing wants to be loved.
• Nothing's fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now.
• Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.
• You can never underestimate the power of cutthroat competition.
• What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.
• Everybody needs a God who looks like them.
• Nobody should go through life without falling in love.
• The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
• It seemed to me it would have been better if God had deleted skin pigment altogether.
• You think too much. It would do you a world of good to stop thinking and just go with your feelings once in a blue moon.
• Enough was enough. You cannot fix the whole world.
• You can be bad at something, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.
• After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.
• Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.
• It's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.
• In life there are things you can't get over no matter how hard you try.
• There is nothing like a small joke at a vigil to help you relax.
• Death was nothing but a doorway.
• Life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.
• I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.
• I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world.
• When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.
• We can't think of changing our skin. Change the world--that's how we gotta think.
• You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.
• People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.
• Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.
• Once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.
• Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes.
• There is nothing perfect. There is only life.
• You can't talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you're not.
• It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
• Regrets don't help anything.
• Sometimes you just need to nurse something.
• If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.
• A person shouldn't look too far down her nose at absurdities.

8/11/2008

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot

• Fear of new things is not an accurate measure of one's potential for growth.
• It doesn't matter what anybody looks like; what matters is what's going on on the inside.
• Love can do strange things to people.
• It's nice to have somebody be nice to you.
• Members of the royal family of Genovia do not "go home" when there is a crisis. No, they stay where they are and slug it out.
• You cannot quit being who you are.
• I would rather not have a boyfriend at all than have one who is only using me for my money or for any reason, really, except that he likes me for me, and nothing else.

7/26/2008