Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

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

12/28/2010--11:35 pm

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer

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

6/24/2010--7:32 pm

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

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

12/22/2010

Just Who Will You Be? by Maria Shriver

• I'm still a work in progress, and I'm writing my next act now.
• Sometimes life happens to you, and--bingo!--your idea of who you think you are just goes up in smoke.
• Fame isn't a goal worthy of your life.
• Just because people know your name, it doesn't mean they know who you are.
• Figuring out who you are, finding your own passion, fulfilling your own dreams--now that's a goal worthy of your life.
• "What do I believe--and who do I want to be?" Answering that question is crucial, because what you believe is the foundation upon which you build yourself as you continue to grow.
• The only way to find a life of meaning and joy is to find your own voice, find your own path, follow your own heart, and live your own life, not an imitation of somebody else's.
• You have a choice. You can spend the rest of your life trying to measure up, trying to figure out and then fulfill other people's expectations of you--or right now, you can make a decision to let all that go. And you can start by talking about what you know, what feel, and what you think. You can start talking about just who you want to be!
• We're all worthy of being loved just for being ourselves.
• It's OK to change. Sometimes it's not just OK, but mandatory. You can let go of some beliefs that maybe have served you well along the way, but just don't work for you anymore. We're supposed to grow and evolve. We have to give ourselves the permission and freedom to stay open to change.
• We are first and foremost human beings in our own right. We're entitled to our own lives, our own dreams and goals, our own legacies.
• You are the only person on this planet with your story. What's the point of being here unless you share it, pass it on, and help somebody else?
• I will try to live an authentic life that feels true to me--which means living life as myself, not an imitation of anyone else, and not the reflection of myself in anyone else's eyes.

11/2/2010, 6:37 pm

1984 by George Orwell

• You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
• The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful.
• To mark the paper was the decisive act.
• It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
• For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage.
• He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
• The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.
• Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
• For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?
• Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?
• Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
• It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.
• For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?
• She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated.
• It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now, but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met.
• The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.
• I'm quite read to take risks, but only for something worth while.
• If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
• It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything--anything--but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.
• They can't get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
• Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of a semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
• To be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past.
• The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
• The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim--for it is an abiding characteristic of the Law that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives--is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
• So long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
• To change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness.
• Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion: the more intelligent, the less sane.
• Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
• Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
• It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.
• No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.
• Alone--free--the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.
• Nothing exists except through human consciousness.
• Everything depends on yourself.
• Everything is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you.
• If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
• Death never came at an expected moment.
• If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.
• If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed.
• There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover.
• Sometimes they threaten you with something--something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself. And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer.

10/4/10--10:22pm

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

• What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?
• Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual.
• If you have a lot of things, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values.
• I want to be more than valuable.
• Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.
• I must endure, keep myself safe for later. What has happened to me, what's happening to me now, won't make any difference to him, he loves me anyway, he knows it isn't my fault. The message will say that also. It's this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive. I believe in the message.
• The greater the risk the greater the glory.
• I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt.
• But who can remember pain, once it's over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sigh, out of mind.
• This is something you can depend upon: there will always be alliances, of one kind or another.
• For every rule there is always an exception.
• It takes a while to get the wrinkles out, of anything new.
• Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.
• To want is to have a weakness.
• You can think clearly only with your clothes on.
• Live in the present, make the most of it, it's all you've got.
• If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.
• Steel yourself, my mother used to say, before examinations I didn't want to take or swims in cold water. I never thought much at the time about what the phrase meant, but it had something to do with metal, with armor, and that's what I would do, I would steel myself. I would pretend not to be present, not in the flesh.
• Why expect one woman to carry out all the functions necessary to the serene running of a household? It isn't reasonable or humane.
• A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
• No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.
• You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.
• The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.
• I'm not talking about sex, he says. That was part of it, the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for.
• Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.
• There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
• The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.
• It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives.
• Freedom, like everything else, is relative.
• A movie about the past is not the same as the past.
• The way love feels is always only approximate.

8/18/2010--10:16 pm

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

• There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
• There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
• There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
• It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.
• There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.
• What was the point of getting dressed if you were staying in bed for the morning?
• If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
• I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.
• From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig we Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
• That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
• In spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.
• If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
• The silence between us was so profound I though part of it must be my fault.
• Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits.
• I thought the small letter at the start might mean that nothing ever really began all new, with a capital, but that it just flowed on from what came before.
• I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
• The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.
• My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
• I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say "Fine."
• I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
• I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death.
• If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.
• Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
• For the few little outward successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.

7/7/2010