Life of Pi by Yann Martel

• That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reading? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?
• If we, citizens, do no support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.
• When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.
• It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.
• Repetition is important in the training not only of animals but also of humans.
• It was my luck to have a few good teachers in my youth, men and women who came into my dark head and lit a match.
• Religion will save us.
• I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
• Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.
• All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
• We are all born like Catholics, aren't we--in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God? After that meeting the matter ends for most of us. If there is a change, it is usually for the lesser rather than the greater; many people seem to lose God along life's way.
• The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way is always the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.
• If you take two steps towards God, God runs to you!
• The presence of God is the finest of rewards.
• These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.
• Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread--these are two laws of nature. If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood!
• Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult? The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.
• People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others. Because of the impression that the future is blocked up, that they might do all right but not their children. Because of the feeling that nothing will change, that happiness and prosperity are possible only somewhere else.
• No greatness without goodness.
• How blinded we are by money.
• Things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to, but what can you do? You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
• Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?
• When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.
• Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing. The sight brings on an oppressive sadness that no car about to hit you or water about to drown you can match.
• I discovered that at that moment that I have a fierce will to live. It's not something evident, in my experience. Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others--and I am one of those--never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go. It may be nothing more than life-hungry stupidity.
• I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear. Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you. The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
• There's nothing like extreme need to give you resolve.
• Was there any reward greater in life? Any punishment worse than death?
• Ignorance is the worst doctor, while rest and sleep are the best nurses.
• Be daunted, but not defeated. Remember: the spirit, above all else, counts. If you have the will to live, you will.
• I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me.
• Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate.
• For the first time I noticed--as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next--that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this.
• Time is an illusion that only makes us pant.
• Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love--but sometimes it was so hard to love.
• The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.
• The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.
• What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.
• Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape.
• It's important in life to conclude things properly. Only then can you let go. Otherwise you are left with words you should have said but never did, and your heart is heavy with remorse.
• Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?
• Be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.
• The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

2/11/2010--2:15 AM

Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells

• Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.--Katherine Mansfield
• It can wear you to a nub, trying to be a popular person and a good Catholic all at the same time.
• If you can't sing it good, Siddalee, at least sing it loud.
• I forget to worry about the next breath, just trust it's gonna come.
• It's the story of my life: not stingy, just a goddamn coward.
• Sidda can't help herself. She just loves books. Loves the way they feel, the way they smell, loves those black letters marching across the white pages. When Sidda falls in love with a book, she is positive that she is the very first person in the world to have discovered it, poor child. Thinks that no one else anywhere, anytime, has ever heard of the book.
• To Sidda and me, books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them.
• Sometimes you just have to reach out and grab what you want, even when they tell you not to.
• When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.
• Don't ever underestimate the power women have over men. And don't ever let them know you have it either.
• You can't run away from things, Siddalee. You've got to stay in this house where your life is. Don't you think I want to run off and hide in a bookmobile or join the circus? We all do. But we have responsibilities.
• You cannot escape from life. Life is not a book. You can't just set it down on the coffee table and walk away from it when it gets boring or you get tired.
• I can do anything in the world I want and no one can stop me. I am a born leader.
• Thoughts have a lot of power. Just thinking about committing a sin is the same thing as actually doing it.
• There is no excuse to let your looks go, no matter how poor you are. Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but honey let me tell you, ugliness will get you nowhere.
• I take my quiet wherever I can find it.
• God will not allow us to be overwhelmed by temptation, but with it He will provide a way of escape so that we will be able to endure it.
• I can never fall asleep until everything is organized and ready to go at the foot of my bed.
• It's running my mouth so much that gets me in trouble to begin with.
• All I am is Gimmee Gimmee Gimmee, and after a while people get sick of me.
• If it's one thing I learnt in this life, it's to bite my tongue when I got to, and yell when I don't.
• You can't look back. Good Lord didn't mean for us to hate ourself. He made us to love ourself like He do, with wide open arms.
• Cause some people God give to you to look out after, and that just be how it is.
• Don't every worry bout bein holy, babychild. Just keep your eyes wide open except when you sleep. Then let the Lord's mighty vision see you through the night.
• I'd like to tell her more, but you just never do know how people are gonna react to things.
• You learn to take your thrills where you can find them.
• Well, we got ourselves into this thing, we got to get ourselves out.
• A man's gotta have somebody to hand his land over to, or what the hell's it all for?
• Lots of times people make the mistake of underestimating you on account of the way you talk.
• It's by a man's eyes that you know his intelligence.
• If we're fighting a war, then let's get it the hell over with!
• You gotta turn it over, is what you gotta do. You gotta give it to the Lord.
• You oughta thank the Good Lord you got two legs to stand on.
• I go to church on Sunday, sleep good at night, and when there's a rain comin in, I stand out on my porch and smell the earth.
• Judgin up to the Good Lord hisself and nobody else.
• Some people, they is gonna be unhappy no matter what. You could give them every'thing you have. Take the blood out you own body and give it to them and they'd still be miserable. That just be the way it is.
• We done lived down the road from sadness all our lives. But you gotta know what sadness be yours and what be somebody else's, is what I say.
• You think somebody gonna throw us a party or somethin for gettin through all this? No sir. You don't get no trophies for livin the life you born into. It just be your job, and you lucky if you can do the work set out in front of you and not fret if it seem puny. Maybe the Good Lord ain't give us nothin but puny things. Little bitta things sparkin through our days and nights. In the fields and in the mornin air, little bitta things that if you blink your eye, they be gone and ain't never comin back.
• I have always found that if you are ever in doubt about how to behave, just act like a hostess, and it'll see you over the rough spots.
• You simply must have decent telephone manners in this world or you will get absolutely nowhere.
• Hold on. If it's meant to be, it'll happen. You have all the time in the world.
• We all need blessings in our cribs, we all need protection from the witches.

1/20/2010--12:04 pm

Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin

• A quick end is a good end.
• In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.
• What a waste, she thinks, to spend one's dreams asleep.
• How long does a dream have to last before it's just life?
• You could drive yourself crazy with ifs.
• People who are happy don't really need to ask themselves if they are happy or not, do they? They just are happy, she thinks.
• Your last words are somehow meant to encapsulate your entire existence.
• Liz shakes her head, vowing to omit um and all equally meaningless words (uh, like, huh, sorta, kinda, oh, hey, maybe) from her vocabulary.
• Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in Canine?
• Even when the body is well, you still find that the mind...Well, the mind has a mind of its own.
• Dead is little more than a state of mind. Many people on Earth spend their whole lives dead.
• The point is the journey.
• Be happy! It's easier to be happy than to be sad. Being sad takes a lot of work. It's exhausting.
• A man should always be as honest as he can.
• Liz finds telling lies easy now that she's started. The only problem (as many before Liz have discovered) is that she has to keep telling more and more of them.
• People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or all bad. Sometimes they're a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes, they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.
• The only way to absolutely ensure things will go badly is to be late.
• Life is better with a little adventure.
• It's difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything's changed.
• Is it weird to like something and not even know why you like it?
• As many have discovered, it is entirely possible (though not particularly desirable) to love two people with all your heart. It is entirely possible to long for two lives, to feel that one life can't come close to containing it all.
• What's Shakespeare say? "The course of true love never did run smooth."
• You'll find that the world has a way of working things out.
• Just because someone did something before doesn't mean they have to do it still.
• Saying you're through with romance is like saying you're done with living. Life is better with a little romance, you know.
• If you are going to forgive a person, Liz decides, it is best to do it sooner rather than later. Later, Liz knows from experience, could be sooner than you thought.
• There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and for Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecisions and revisions. And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles. And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk. And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything. Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess.
• Happiness is a choice.
• When one is happy, time passes quickly.
• A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.
• I believe good things happen every day. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen.

1/17/2010--11:08 pm

Escape by Carolyn Jessop

• Why should I feel disgraced? I knew in my heart that there was nothing wrong with being a woman. I wanted to roar like a woman. I knew that would never be allowed, but that didn't stop me from being proud of myself. I was a woman, not a fake!
• No one wants to be made to feel inferior.
• Nothing seemed crueler than the loss of a child.
• Sadness was acceptable during the immediate aftermath, but questioning God was not.
• God had the right to give and right to take away.
• The death of a family member was actually a blessing because it gave our family a representative on the other side who would try to protect us.
• Where much is given, much is required.
• If you put yourself in a place where the devil has sole power, he can take your life.
• I loved the steadying rhythm of the waves. It was powerful but not at all frightening. I felt small, safe, and protected.
• People who have never been taught or allowed to think for themselves don't suddenly change. Change is too frightening.

12/20/2009--5:45 p.m.

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult

• When flames are licking at your heels you've got to break a wall or two if you want to escape.
• People who have been backed into a corner will do anything to fight their way to the center again.
• You know how every now and then, you have a moment where your whole life stretches out ahead of you like a forked road, and even as you choose one gritty path you've got your eyes on the other the whole time, certain you're making a mistake?
• Half the battle is figuring out what works for you.
• I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.
• Since when does anyone get the option to do what's easiest?
• A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.
• A real friend isn't capable of feeling sorry for you.
• There are always sides. There is always a winner, and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.
• If you focus on sandbagging the beachhead, you can ignore the tsunami that's approaching.
• It is the things you cannot see coming that are strong enough to kill you.
• Zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.
• Helping someone who needs it is the right thing to do.
• What do parents look like? You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across? Like that.
• No matter who you are, there is some part of you that always wishes you were someone else.
• There is a moment during a structure fire when you know you are either going to get the upper hand, or that it's going to get the upper hand on you. You notice the ceiling patch about to fall and the staircase eating itself alive and the synthetic carpet glued to the soles of your boots. The sum of the parts overwhelms, and that's when you back out and force yourself to remember that every fire will burn itself out, even without your help.
• Dark matter has a gravitational effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.
• Nobody ever wants what they've got.
• If you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving.
• That's pretty much the way it goes--fix one leak in the dike just in time to watch another one start spouting.
• There are no guarantees about anything, least of all one's future.
• Why are terms of endearment always foods? Honey, cookie, sugar, pumpkin. It's not like caring about someone is enough to actually sustain you.
• Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in.
• Do all the wonderful things happen when we are not aware of them?
• There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. It's far easier than telling ourselves the truth.
• There are some nights when you just want to know there's someone else besides you in this wide world.
• Fortunes were like clay and could be reshaped at any time. But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else's, and for some people that just wasn't good enough.
• You will always be up against someone. Something.
• You ought to be attracted to someone for what they've got inside them, not for the package it's presented in.
• Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.
• Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it.
• Time is an optical illusion--never quite as solid or strong as we think it is.
• It doesn't take a whole long life to realize that what we deserve to have, we rarely get.
• There is a point when a structure fire is raging out of control that you simply have to give it the distance to burn itself out. So you move back to safety, to a hill out of the wind, and you watch the building eat itself alive.
• When you don't know where you're headed, you find places no one else would ever think to explore.
• Life sometimes get so bogged down in the details, you forget you are living it.
• Sometimes to get what you want the most, you have to do what you want the least.
• You have to be able to laugh at yourself, don't you?
• Morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.
• See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.

9/12/2009--12:56 am

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer

• I'm sure about you. The rest I can live through.
• There couldn't be a law if there was no punishment; there couldn't be a punishment if there was no one to deliver it.
• Strong emotions can alter us in permanent ways.
• The past is past and I can't do anything to change it.
• What's the point to all the pain?
• You always want the very most what you can never, ever have.
• That's the funny thing about knowing you can't have something. It makes you desperate.
• Each new disaster seemed kinda obvious in hindsight.
• It wouldn't be good to let any emotion take too strong a hold on my frame of mind.
• I knew there was a lot that I needed to see for myself before it would be real.
• Not many people get every single thing they want, plus all the things they didn't think to ask for, in the same day.
• All I wanted was to love him as much as possible in the limited time given to me.
• Whatever end found us, it would not find us separated.
• None of us can entirely control our subconscious desires.
• Only the known is safe. Only the known is tolerable. The unknown is...a vulnerability.
• Not that I'd want to repeat the last several weeks, but I had to admit they'd made me appreciate what I had more than ever.

8/8/2009--10:35 PM

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

• It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
• A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything.
• History isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion.
• A person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey.
• That's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
• Coming close wasn't the same as winning, was it?
• Winners won and everyone else just went home.
• Better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
• They say there is a brotherhood between people who've fed from the same breast.
• Nothing was free in this world.
• In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things.
• War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
• People need stories to divert them at difficult times.
• Boys and girls must know the legacy of their fathers.
• What happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime.
• Bruises healed. Reputations did not.
• Sad stories make good books.
• How could I, of all people, chastise someone for their past?
• I firmly believed that if I had picked up a rifle and gone on a murdering rampage, I would have still had the benefit of her unblinking love.
• Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they're just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nangand namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.
• There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.
• It always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.
• Time can be a greedy thing--sometimes it steals all the details for itself.
• A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.
• And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, when guilt leads to good.
• There are bad people in this world, and sometimes bad people stay bad. Sometimes you have to stand up to them.
• Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

6/25/2009--9:33 PM