Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Can't keep on with the same stuff all the time. Gets boring.
• It doesn't really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home.
• It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.
• It was up to each of us to make of our lives what we could.
• If students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent.
• The memories I value most, I don't see them ever fading.

2/14/2011--10:05 am

Timbuktu by Paul Auster

• Know thine enemy--and then keep a wide berth.
• No one can ever amount to anything in this life without someone else to believe in him.
• Since life was a gamble anyway, why not go for broke?
• The more wretched your life was, the closer you were to the truth, to the gritty nub of existence.
• Throw yourself into the arms of the world and the air will hold you. Hold back and the world will jump you from behind.
• Good stories were not necessarily true stories.
• It all balances out in the end, doesn't it? Just when you think you're top gun, you wind up as bottom dog.
• The human spirit is a dull instrument, and often we're no better at figuring out how to take care of ourselves than the lowest worm in the ground. Whatever else I've been, I've never let myself be that worm. I've jumped, I've galloped, I've soared, and no matter how many times I've crashed back to earth, I've always picked myself up and tried again.
• To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.
• I've done my best, but sometimes a man's best isn't good enough.
• Only out of stubbornness are great things born.
• How could you know unless you tried?
• You couldn't just blunder in and hope for the best.
• Love was not a quantifiable substance. There was always more of it somewhere, and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another.
• If death is everywhere, what difference does it make where you go?
• Such is the way with dogs. They might not always understand the nuances of their masters' thoughts, but they feel what they feel.
• What good was a home if you didn't feel safe in it?
• That's the trouble with young ones. They might mean well, but they don't have any power.
• Not all stories have happy endings.
• The world was filled with such wonders, and it was a sad state of affairs when a man spent his time worrying about the wrong things.
• Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get.
• You didn't turn your back on a person for letting you down just once--not after a lifetime of friendship, you didn't and especially not if there were extenuating circumstances.
• There was much to be thankful for, and much life still to be lived.

1/8/2011--2:15 pm

Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho

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

12/28/2010--11:35 pm

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer

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

6/24/2010--7:32 pm

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

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

12/22/2010

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