“We lose ourselves in books, we find ourselves there too.”
Cause I am a little obsessed with books, books’ covers, and of course, lists š
Also on Goodreads and Storygraph
Book 242
Book 241
Book 240
Book 239
Book 238
Book 237
Book 236
Book 235
Book 234
Book 233
Book 232
Book 231
Book 230
Book 229
Book 228
Book 227
Book 226
Book 225
Book 224
Book 223
Book 222
Quickly became one of my favourite books…
– I bring together the living and the departed. I am the go-between.
– Thank you for loving me. Lies and all.
– When a life was lost, who did it belong to? What were those left behind meant to do with the incomprehensible, inescapable loss?
– Being a witness to a personās pain isnāt something you can do half-heartedly.
– People are designed to feel grief only over the death of someone they truly love.
– Thereās somebody you wish to see, isnāt there?
– We fell into a long silence, which I later regretted. The quiet in the air held too much meaning for two strangers making small talk.
Book 221
Book 220
– When I was five, my halmoni taught me how to make origami cranes. ā¦ Sometimes I think of those cranes. How existence can sprout from nothing. How Iāve mastered the art of folding into myself, pleat by tiny pleat. ā¦ Sometimes I head up to the roof and peer over the crumbling wall ā¦ But itās about the possibilitiesāthe prospect of escape, the idea that Iāll become fully realized once Iām gone.
– Everyone has some ugly inside them.
– Oh, but that twinge in my chest. All that feeling, springing forth. Isnāt it beautiful, just to feel?
– Four thousand, two hundred sixty-seven dollars and fifty-five cents.
This is what Iām worth: stacks of crumpled bills, light in my palms. If Iām not careful, they might slip away, spiraling into the night like smoke. Five thousand, seven hundred thirty-two dollars and forty-five cents to go. Then I can disappear.
– I subsist on it, that burrowing want. For emergence. A budding. A release.
– Sometimes I head up to the roof and peer over the crumbling wall, six stories to the ground. The thrill of falling, without the fall. My body both drained and energized, quaking with the reminder of being alive.
– Halmoni is a bird with a crest of white hair floating about her face. She swims in her faded blue shirt, which used to be mine. Soon, she might disappear completely, leaving only a mound of cotton behind.
Book 219
– What love truly is has the power to change youāin the best wayādepths and layers revealing themselves only once the heart is brave enough to listen.
– Somebody once told me something that changed the way I looked at the world: people heal at their own pace. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is to step away completely from the world until youāve found yourself again. Until youāre ready.
Book 218
– Apologies donāt even mean as much as justā¦just acknowledging that you fucked up, hurt people, and that you donāt wanna do that anymore. Not to yourself either. Thatās sometimes the hardest part.
– Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.
– Life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you, into tiny unrecognizable pieces. You have to be ready to pick everything up pragmatically. Keep your head down and make it work.
– Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like weāve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but canāt, itās like weāre afraid weāll be punished for it.
– Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy.
– Crying is for when there’s nothing else left to do.
– Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks theyāre winning when they say āGet over it.ā
– We all fuck up. Itās how we come back from it that matters.
– We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you canāt leave a war once youāve been, you can only keep it at bay.
– Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that theyāre jumping.
Book 217
– Some kinds of love are as dangerous as hate.
– Supposed to is society telling us what motherhood should look like. Most of you are here because you didn’t measure up to that supposed-to. We’re here to say to hell with supposed-to!.
– Why is it that sentences that begin You don’t have to worry are always the ones especially designed to produce exactly that effect?
– The reason some women experience aural hallucinations, Esta had gone on to explain, is that Mother Nature has made our hearing extra-acute so we can hear our babies’ cried in the night.
– We both wanted to put the world in order after it had fallen to pieces.
– I guess that’s what a really good story does. It makes you forget about yourself for a while.
– Pregnancy is like having an alien take up residence in your body.
– I am aware of how crazy it sounds to think that a mental patient is trying to hail me from her cell. And if I know how crazy it sounds, that means I am not crazy. Right?
– It must have been hard to see patients like E. who had so much potential but were hopelessly entangled in the working of their own misfiring brains.
– At least my mother had the good grace to die in a drunken car accident that left little wriggle room as to her intentions.
– Bit I can’t help also remembering what Laurel said about hearing voices: They all sound sensible at the time.
– Becoming a mother has changed me. I feel like an entirely new person.
– I hear Laurel’s voice in my head: We are supposed to fall in lobe with this total stranger.
– Maybe I’ll walk into the Hudson with rocks in my pockets like Virginia Wolf.
– Quelle surprise! I can hear Laurel say, it’s easier being a rich heiress than trailer-park trash. I could point out that I did not grow up in a trailer park, but I am trying not to argue with my voices.
– Organizing books and papers is not half as gratifying as organizing people. It’s amazing what a little practical thinking can do for a person.
– Mommy always said that only weak women allowed men to bully them and that if you acted as if you expected people to treat you well, they would.
– I am not the only one who has things she doesn’t want to talk about.
– You can’t put together something that’s broken. It’s like trying to glue together a priceless Ming vase. In the end it’s just a piece of broken trash.
– Why should the outcome of my escape be any better? Because you are not crazy. I’d like to agree with Laurel, but the fact that I’m hearing voices undermines her message.
Book 216
– Too proud to whitewash, too poor to paint.
– Annie begins to track down the truth, navigating a decadeās worth of secrets, folklore of witches and crows, and a whole town that prefers to forget.
– Youāll never find the truth if you go around trying to catch someone who doesnāt exist.
– It, whatever it is, is a thing that women know of. A thing that we all carryāa decision, a gift, a burden, a chance, a mistake, a choice.
Book 215
But as every gardener knows, nothing stays buried forever.
Book 214
– There is no rejection, there is only redirection.
– You donāt have to understand life. You just have to live it.
– Never underestimate the big importance of small things.
– We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.
– Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff.
– Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations.
– She was a waterfall of apologies. She was drowning in herself.
– If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.
– It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.
– We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. āItās not what you look at that matters, itās what you see.āā āYou know Thoreau?
– A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.
– Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.
– And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You canāt have one without the other.
– You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.
– Want,ā she told her, in a measured tone, āis an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.
– The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.
– Regrets donāt leave. They werenāt mosquito bites. They itch for ever.
– It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.
– She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.
– Sometimes regrets arenāt based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just…ā She searched for the appropriate term and found it. āA load of bullshit.
– Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.
– The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ātonic of wildnessā as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
– You can have everything and feel nothing.
– She realised that she hadnāt tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.
– Why want another universe if this one has dogs?
– To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
– Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.
– Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.
– The prison wasnāt the place, but the perspective.
– Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.
– You can choose choices but not outcomes.
– āIt seems impossible to live without hurting people.’ ‘That’s because it is.’ ‘So why live at all?’
‘Well, in fairness, dying hurts people too.ā
Book 213
– I am the director, I am in charge. But not really. What happens on a given day more often ends up directing me than the other way around.
– The fog so dense it clings like an extra layer of clothes.
– Like everything had gone according to plan, as if we had planned for this outcome, No job, no reason to stop drinking.
– They think they are going to screw up. A lot of them started drinking again just to get the screw-up part over with rather than to keep waiting for it to happen.
– Numbers don’t like, people do; and I was lying for a living.
– A few of the kitchen staff drop the food into the dumpster instead of giving it to me, but most of them put it in takeout boxes and set it on the pavement, bending over real slow, keeping just far enough away from me like they are feeding a stray dog that’ll bolt if they make a sudden move.
– I am homeless and I’m not about to tell him. We’re all equals here. Me, letting him know I’m homeless, would change that. I’m a guy in a bad with other guys in a bad. Kind of nice to be seen that way.
– Moving to escape your problems is what you call a geographic. At least that’s what alcohol counselors have told me. I don’t know why everything has to have a name. It’s kind of a judgment.
– 357 is Walter’s file number. Rosemary avoids calling clients by their name to keep her distance, so when they start drinking again it doesn’t bother her. I think it still does.
– No one grows up wishing to be an alcoholic, Stacey would tell me, but no one makes them drink either. They can quit if they choose. Don’t take on someone else’s sobriety. Concentrate on your own.
– Rosemary has been clean and sober for twenty-odd years and is big on rules. She believes if you bend them at work you’ll bend them in your life, and that will lead to drinking.
– Expectations are premeditated resentments, I say, quoting from it. Focus on the good things happening now. Today you are not drinking.
– Don’t trip. I take a deep breath. You can do this. Sure, sure, the voice in my head says.
– I don’t have to walk, I could catch a bus, but I want to walk. In my clean clothes, strolling to work like everyone else. Nobody knows who I am. They think I am one of them. I laugh.
– The gray drag of the fog keeps everyone inside. What happens in teh Richmond, stays in the Richmond.
– We don’t belong here, the husband said. But you’re here, I replied.
– Be a mystery, I told myself, and exert control.
– The sense of betrayal. The tears. All the self respect they had clawed back into their lives after years of screwing up, or maybe not screwing up but just experiencing bad luck, gone in two or three sentences it takes me to tell them they are out of a job. What will they have left? A room at a residential hotel they will no longer be able to pay, a mirror over a sink they will no longer want to look at. Thats what.
– As if standing in line and sleeping in a shelter gads aways been their life. After a while, it probably feels that way.
– Suicide? No. Cutting. Like high school kids do. Deal with the pain on the inside by hurting yourself on the outside.
– Everyone I know works. That’s how a guy defines himself.
– That feeling of holding someone and of being held and I was lost for a moment.
– But he didn’t drink half his life away like the rest of us. AA meetings are our classes. Our sobriety chips are our degrees.
– He went to school. Not all of us will. Not all of us want to risk failing. That’s one good way tos tart drinking again.
– You don’t go to a whorehouse for a kiss. You don’t hang out with a drunk for their company if you’re not drinking.
– You get raised to do the right thing and tell the truth, but not if it might bite you in the ass. That’s the message.
– Sometimes I envied Raymond and his faith. How he could read passages from the Bible and believe without question. If you ask me what I believe, I couldn’t tell you. Surviving I guess.
– We don’t have expectations. We’re not trying to save lives. Just trying to make them a little better.
– The Big Book talks about humility. be mad and keep drinking, or be humble and let things o and stay sober.
Book 212
– Recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.
– I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you canāt have one without the other.
– You may have noticed that when I do manage to care, Iām a pessimist.
– I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
– Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. Iād rather climb back into Hostile Oneās mouth.
– And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.
– The sense of urgency just wasnāt there. Also, you may have noticed, I donāt care.
– I remember every word ever said to me.” That was a lie. Who would want that? Most of it I delete from permanent memory.
– I don’t know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isn’t that, it’s that I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me.
– It was a low-stress group, they didnāt argue much or antagonize each other for fun, and were fairly restful to be around, as long as they didnāt try to talk or interact with me in any way.
– All right,” she said, and looked at me for what objectively I knew was 2.4 seconds and subjectively about twenty excruciating minutes.
Book 211
– It hardly seems real, does it?ā he mutters to Cara. āI mean, what does this guy do? Dismember people in his kitchen, then sit back and watch Star Wars?
– The majority of murders are committed by someone close to the victim.
– She thought herself unlovable. Too much of a mess, too broken.
– In terms of risky behavior, this is no more than the next in a long line of shitty decisions.
– He’s spent the last year resolutely by himself, bit with the simple act of one night in someone’s company, he suddenly can’t bear to be alone.
– Her husband had just died. but who decides the best way forward after a death is quiet, dignified grief?
– Typical. Takes a fucked up cop to make a fucked up connection.
– But he’s right. She’s stupid. She makes bad, terrible decisions. But she thought that he saw past that; saw a woman that was more than the chaos she makes of her life.
– She knows what she’s doing is destroying her, piece by piece. But it’s punishment for being such a fuck-up. Punishment for not being normal.
– He knows how it is to be different, to not live in the same world as everyone else.
– Naming a serial killer gives the perpetrator a sense of importance. A level of infamy shared by other murderers of the past. Son of Sam, BTK, The green River Killer.
– People have said the same things to her before, but coming from Griffin it feels different.
– Maybe, she wonders, taking in his warmth, maybe the key isn’t getting rid of the crazy. Maybe it’s finding someone just as broken, who understands.
– The alternative personality states shown by the patient were voluntary role-playing, used as a tool for Robert to escape everyday life.
– It doesn’t work like that, Jess. Ignoring grief doesn’t make it go away, as much as you’d like it to.
– Perhaps you don’t need fixing, Griffin says quietly. Perhaps we’re all supposed to be brokem just a little.
– Child abuse is common in serial offenders. Sadly, despite what the media likes to portray, most killers are made rather than born.
Book 210
– My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.
– Anything covered is always interesting. There is never nothing beneath something that is covered.
– I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.
– We have to mourn our dead, but we cannot let them take over our life.
– I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.
– How do we set about not imagining something?
– What is worse? To be chained all day with a bowl of water, or to be free and die of thirst?
– She had no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.
– I wanted my whole life so far to slip away with the rolling waves, to begin a different kind of life. But I didn’t know what that meant or how to get to it.
– Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.
– I had broken the rules of exchange. She had given and I had taken, but I had not reciprocated. A gift like love is never free.
– This was the model most politicians had adopted to run their democracies and dictatorships. If the reality of the right hand is being messed up with the left hand, it would be true to say that reality is not a stable commodity.
– It smelt of coconut ice cream and sweat and the Mediterranean sea.
– The face beneath the mask has to grow seamlessly into the mask.
– My motherās words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.
– Rose rested her pink eyes on my eyes. I removed my gaze like a traitor.
– But the phrase about the dream being over implied that something had started and had now ended. It was up to the dreamer to say it was over, no one else could say it on their behalf.
– Julieta looks at me, and then she laughs. āYour boundaries are made from sand, Sofia.ā āYes,ā I say. āI know that.
Book 209
– Life is about choices, and no matter which ones you make, I love you. Donāt ever apologize for going one way or another, just know you can always change. Youāre living proof of that, arenāt you? Iāve learned from my mistakes, too. Your papa and I, we both did. We should have let you do what made you happy, not what we thought was best.
– Raisa didnāt read books; it was like she absorbed them into her bloodstream.
– The impossible is always possible.
– I hate math. Americans hate math. Only Soviets think numbers are worth anything.
– She always tried to do the problems, but she never excelled the way her parents expected. When she looked at a triangle, she didn’t see a hypotenuse or the area that fell inside those three lines. She saw the silhouette, the jagged cut in white space on the page. She saw the light illuminated and hid, magnified and laid the truth bare.
– Unlike schoolwork, drawing came easily. When she drew the pain she felt dulled with every line she added to the page.
– Molly tried to tell herself it would be all right, that trying to fit in was exhausting anyway. It was easier to live in her artwork.
– Enough with the art. Put your time where it matters. “Art matters” it will never put food on the table, Papa said.
– I’ve wasted years on a stupid dream. We are in America Papa. They don’t ask for papers. And the war, it’s over. “Are you sure? One day they will start asking for papers”.
– He was one of the few men who ever requested to work with her, who wasn’t intimidated by a woman knowing more than he did.
– “Outthink them”, Yulia liked to say. “You’ll never be stronger, but you will always be smarter”.
– Most times I see an attractive Nazi, I take in his looks, and then I imagine how I would torture him before I’d kill him.
– We’re his props, you see. He will stand on our backs to reach greatness.
– Radioactive elements want to be stable. It’s why they shed their outer layers. Don’t we all want that, stability?
– She would change the course. She would choose her family.
– She wasn’t going to college. She didn’t need to deal with another place where her parents expected her to be brilliant, where she was surrounded by people who mistook her disinterest for lack os smarts.
– She saw love in her parents, in the quiet between them where they spoke without words, in the way they anticipated each other, did for each other.
– If you are an artist, all those critics can tell you you’re a genius and list the reasons why, but then they can use the same reasons to call you a fool. Idiocy or brilliance determined by a whim. I don’t want that for you.
– We know better than most that you can always restart your life.
-During the birth Molly didn’t hold back. She screamed with all her might and it had nothing to do with the child tearing her apart. It was her old self pulling her to pieces, and as she pushed it awat, she made room for the baby.
– When she woke up, Mama handed her the baby. Molly waited to be struck with love, only she wasn’t and it made her panic. “I don’t love her”, Molly said, her voice a scratch. “It takes time,” Mama interrupted. “It takes time to love. Any mother who can’t admit that is lying.”
– The little girl stood there crying silent tears. She didn’t shake or whimper like other kids, and Molly was torn between feeling proud and upset her daughter was forced to be that strong. “It’s ok to be sad” She said to Raisa.
– Then it was just Molly and that bottle of pills, and wjole the container was small, it took over the entire apartment.
– She did Baba’s hair slowly because she’d learned it was a way to sit with her grandmother and touch her, to be with her without saying a word.
– Finding the right answer to a test means I studied. It doesn’t mean I am smart. To be smart you have to have ideas of your own.
– Your elbow looks close, but you can’t bite it.
– Somehow she had spent her whole life that way, just a little late or a little early, working a little too hard or not quite hard enough.In a heartbeat Molly was enclosed in one of her mother’s tight, full-body hugs, the kind she had hated as a teenager. It used to feel overwhelming, but now it was what Molly wanted and she fell into it, leaned hard.
– I’ve always been proud of you, You…you just never heard me say it, I’m sorry I didn’t make my voice louder. Being a mother, you never know what’s right until it’s too late.
– My grandparents showed me there is more to life than surviving. I don’t know much about what they lived through, but enough to know they’re qualified to say that.
– When I draw, I’m lost in the world. In a good way,. Everything else seems easier to deal with.
– Already she could tell Vito had the American habit of talking to fill silence.
– Not every woman is a natural mother.
– One mistake is never the problem. The real problem is not looking at the arc of bad decisions.
– “I’d know you anywhere, my heart”
Book 208
– It wasn’t lost on Henley that every fantasy of a different life didn’t include Rob.
– We take it one day at a time. That’s what we’ve always said. We deal with the here and now, not focus on how things may be in two, three, or ten year’s time. Otherwise we will never enjoy our lives.
– But it’s nice to have a plan, you know? In case it all goes tits up.
– Don’t take it out on me because your better half has got you eating plants.
– Ramouter kneeled and watched his son; he didn’t want to touch him and contaminate him with the dark residue of his day.
– It was a connection that had been instant and instinctive with Pellacia, whereas with Rob it was something that she had to work on, to learn as though she was reviewing for an exam.
– She silently counted to three and visualized placing her emotions in a box and closing the lid.
– She’s in the garden, Kerr’s ex-husband, Tobias, informed Henley. She spends a lot of time out there, as if she’s trying to breathe in all the air she can.
– Believe me, that’s a game of “what ifs?” and there are no winners.
Book 207
– Ramouter sat back in his chair and felt a small release of tension in his body after holding onto the weight of undeserved guilt for so long.
– It was easier to battle through the sleepless nights and memories of Olivier invading his daydreams, than it was dealing with the living nightmare of watching his wife disappear right in front of him.
– Unlike the Anna’s, there was nothing artificial about Henley’s home, except maybe the affection between herself and her husband.
– Maggots moved like a cult around a false idol.
– There are families out there who have to make a choice between buying food for their kids or paying rent. There are so many out there struggling.
– Sometimes overfamiliarity can get in the way.
– People always remember the first thing you said and the last thing.
– Being so disempowered could lead to undeserved sense of self-blame.
– They say grief is a sign of how much you love someone, but grief can be like an anchor, dragging you out to sea to meet the Kranken.
– How could you represent a guilty person?
– I didn’t get much sleep either, you know, guilt will do that to you.
Book 206
– The world can age you.
– I always find it odd when people say that of the dead. They had their whole life ahead of them. Clearly, they didn’t because they’re dead. We may not like the method of disposal but when it’s your time to go, then it’s your time to go.
– And nothing stays buried forever. Secrets have a way of coming out.
– People get into relationships with all sorts of strange people. Some people like a project. Turn them into someone different.
– They thought they had seen it all, until life presented them with a fresh kind of hell.
– A storm is coming, and you are not ready.
– The media didn’t care and were biased towards reporting the disappearance of a blonde blue-eyed white girls instead of a black woman.
– I’m broken. I never wanted you to see me broken.
– He seemed like the sort of man who advocated antihomeless spikes outside his office building.
Book 205
– Maju, how are my eyes so small if I see the world so big?
– Every mother at some point has wished for their kid to disappear.
– Even if we don’t know everything, we always know everything.
– I thought of buying jewlry, but I already had plenty and I wasn’t one carat happier for it.
– Memory is a stillborn child. Already decomposing. How hard I fight for Lauro to never decompose. Can I keep his face from disappearing by thinking about him every day?
– We can save tears the same way we save coins.
– But it was a marriage, with teh subtle deadly force of most marriages. And with such an absence of conflict that no matter what happened beneath the surface, everything always seemed fine.
Of course the sec wasn’t keeping out neighbors ip, Especially after Cora was born. It happens to every mother. How can you feel lust when you’ve just stopped being your own person?
– You’ll bleed again, Maju. You’ll die alone.
– Only Mrs Andreia, the only one who also needs a maid standing at the edge of the pool to hold her cipirinha, to make sure the kids won’t knock it over – and not for the sake of the kids.
– I am like an armadillo, I can’t see a hole and not go inside to check it out.
– It’s the problem with kids of this generation, they think they have to be doing something at all times, as if living isn’t enough already.
– No one is born to be anything.
– I thought I would have followed her through many gardens.
– God. I was jealous of her for believing in God like that, for having a crutch to help her get through life.
– It takes some time to venture beyond the reach of Starbucks. the further we moved away from capitalism, the more the world around us blossomed with beauty.
– Taken by the music, I started to feel the barrier between myself and the other people and the plants and the moon disintegrate. And being everything, I wasn’t me anymore. And not being me, I didn’t suffer as much. It was the closest to the divine I’d ever been, something no religion with its liturgical effort had offered me.
– Later Yara told me the church had always tried to ban ayahuasca for this reason, because it realized its power. While Catholics and Protestants need an intermediary, the priest, the bishop, to reach God, the tea dismantled that hierarchy, putting anyone in direct contact with the divine or something that feels like it.
– I know that my nana Brigida loved me because she did everything for me, but I never heard the sentence come out of her mouth, no one at the farm said it. It was like love was something too delicate for us, a box of bonbons with pretty paper that only some hands may unwrap.
– As someone told me once, hunger will come when you eat. Maybe love comes when you love.
– Later, like any person tormented by love and therefore by cyclical obsessive thoughts, I started to think I may have overreacted and then that I hadn’t, then that I had…
– I nestled against him, regretting the mechanisms of marriage, the dynamics that both generate and erode love.Or was it only a matter of time, the inevitable erosion of love that comes with time?
– Mess is the first sign of crazy.
– Live a little, and then come back to live some more when it hurts less.
– Having a missing child might be even worse than a dead one.
– Mixology is a luxury for those living above the disaster line – which is why you never see a factory worker or a soldier swirling or drinking from a stemmed glass, casually placing an orange twist on the rim.
– I only gave birth to Cora. To be a mother you need to adopt the child after birth.
– I go to the balcony to get some fresh air. It makes no difference. I need more, the entire atmosphere.
– A storm is coming and you’re not ready.
– The media didn’t care and were biased toward reporting the disappearance of a bonde, lblue-eyed white girl instead of a black woman.
Book 204
– Houses remember.
– Use a knife, use a sword, use a pair of fucking kitchen shears if you must, but cut yourself free.
– Sometimes we donāt really know weāve won until we see the reflection of that win in the loserās eyes.
– Stories change depending on who’s telling them.
– You want to stick your head in the sand, and make this all go away. But the thing is, itās not going to. The sand doesnāt FIX the problem, it just HIDES it.
– People are never just gone, after all. There are always marks, always signs.
– āIāll miss you forever, Mari,ā Lara says. āBut Iām not giving you absolution. We donāt deserve it.ā
– Sheās inevitable.
– If you want to receive the good things the universe has for you, Em, you canāt have ugly thoughts blocking the path. We have to let go of pain and resentment if we want the gifts we deserve.
– How is it that someone can bring out the very best and the very worst of you all at once?
– This person is bad, they do a bad thing, or this house is bad, it makes people do a bad thing.
– Now, you can either accept that or you can decide that this kind of thing is a deal breaker for you, but what you canāt do is keep getting upset over the same thing. Sheās never gonna not do this kind of shit.
– Sheāll be gone soon, but the villa will stand for much longer, she knows, and that means sheās never really gone. Neither is Pierce, or Lara, or Noel, or even Johnnie. They still walk those halls, and soon so will she. So will others who come after her. Houses remember.
Book 203
– If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words
– Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.
– Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.
– Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama’s face, our family’s future.
My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.
– This has always been our fate,ā she says. āSimply to endure,ā she says, āis to triumph.
– Guard the portals of your mind.
– I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don’t understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see.
– A man who doles out sweets, and slaps, with the same hand.
– I inhale deeply, drinking the warmth in the scent of mountain sunshine,
a warmth that smells of freshly turned soil and clean laundry baking in the sun.
– A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it’s time to make a stew.
– How odd is it that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.
– I nod yes-no-yes-no and run back to Ama, afraid to tell her about this new auntie who smells of amber and jasmine and possibility.
– This is also the season when the women drink the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree to do away with the babies in their wombsāthe ones who would be born only to be buried next season.
Book 202
– My point was that the bereaved can have very vivid experiences of seeing the dead. Grief can do crazy things to your mind.
– Empty vessels. Perhaps this is what we mother should aspire to be,
– If Stella was a boy, Emmy wouldn’t have made such a big fuss about her picking up a dead gannet. The problem is that Stella’s a girl and so her interest in the thing comes across as macabre.
– Becoming a mother sends your pain tolerance sky-high, and that isn’t always a good thing.
– Although you think your personality is something essential and unchangeable, really it relies on the pressure of other personalities holding its shape. Without other people, your edges dissolve. You don’t become more yourself when you’re completely alone. You become less so.
– She had a special kind of total presence, one that somehow felt like absence.
– “If someone invades your personal space, you should punch that bastard right in the face”
– Normally I apologized for everything, including things I hadn’t done. I apologized when someone stepped in front of me to grab the last shopping basket at the supermarket.
– I felt that this apology had cost me something: I’d put myself in the wrong.
– “Where I come from, bread is “holy”, Irina said. “It’s the opposite of here,” I murmured dreamily. Emmy said gluten is bad for you, regardless whether you had celiac.
– To be only one color, all the time, was to be numb. This wasn’t Stella. She felt all the emotions, and she felt them all intensely. She was indigo, crimson, and gold. She was a whole sunset.
– It took so little to stop a person from killing themselves. I’d read that all you had to do was smile at someone as they made their way to teh Golden Gate Bridge, and that could be enough to make them turn back.
– “I know several people who have had vivid encounters with the dead. I don’t leap to the conclusion that they have a mental illness”
– People feared voraciousness in women. “They should not take too much space, have too many desires”. At the time, I’d thought this absurd: when people see a woman tucking into a hearty meal, they hardly fear she’s destabilizing patriarchy”
– She doesn’t “do” stress. Is this the key to who she is? This could explain how she survived so much, how she keeps moving forward, embracing whatever comes.
– It probably baffled her that I liked to cook so much. All that effort for something that was going to disappear in a few minutes.
Book 201
– You wish to never see a plum again in your lifeā¦ You When I am an adult, I will never have a fruit tree. I will never be like this.
– Of course, you cannot afford to be found out, but you do not think that far ahead. You know there will be consequences, and maybe that is the point.
– The rule in your family is don’t mess up. If you have to mess up, it should be in a new way, one you could not anticipate. If it’s a way you could have anticipated, it is your fault and you will get the consequences. After all, you did know better.
– You can cry at night but not during the day. Not when there could be another person who could hear you.
– You think it’s a miracle that headphones even exist, that there is a way you cannot her the worlkd you’re in, that you can hide yourself away, that they cannot know
about it. That you will be safe in your room for some time.
– You’re going to get out, the way a shooting star is getting out: meant to go, not meant to stay there stuck forever with no hopes. This is your nature. This is who you are and who cannot be destroyed or told to shut up.
– You have no idea what it would be like to be twins, but you know what it’s like to be his little sister. It is like you are hiking on a muddy precarious trail and you put your feet in his boot prints.
– You do not have to think maybe I am not safe here maybe these grownups shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.
– You are here today, trying to get from bed to school, where you ill be safe in a way, for at least 6 hours.
– You turn your insides cold and remind yourself what happens in your house does not happen to you – it happens to someone else, some other family, not yours.
– Dad even at his maddest can get more mad.
– The police are easy to fool. They do not have long here. They are not looking for a family like this one, blond har and big blue eyes, the girl in a ruffle pink apron baking box-mix muffins. They are not looking for two parents they can count, wearing shirts with all the buttons done up, wearing glasses, holding magazines. A normal people family. And that is why you are this family tonight.
– You are glad he is going out because things are calm, as if the sky lost its ability to could.
– A problem is something you can no longer ignore. A problem is something that fills a room.
– The days move one at a time, one meal at a time, with only little pockets on aloneness for you to fund and enjoy.
– You do not know this yet, but you are raising you.
– You love the feeling of knowing again that youa re the only person you can rely on. It’s a good and horrible feeling.
– You go two years without talking, then six. It is easier now not to call or talk. Who would want to hear how long it’s been and why can’t you call more?
– You believe you have made it through. If you are playing this back, you have come a great distance. You should feel proud of yourself. Do not hate yourself for surviving.
– You have one brother and you have no brothers. You have two parents and you have no parents. You’ve done so much your whole life.
– You can do anything for another 10 seconds.
– You think you could be a better nicer person on a plane to Tahiti.
– You buy yourself balloons on Mother’s Day. You mother yourself,. You deserve this.
Book 200
– My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day.
– I was 12 years old. This was the morning of the last day of my childhood.
– This could be charged of women and girls whop exhibited themselves: their bodies. Particularly if their bodies were imperfect in ovbious ways – too fat.
– As, you’d discover, there was no masculine equivalent for bitch, slur.
– You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?
– To their children, parents are not identical. The mother I knew as the youngest of seven children was certainly not the mother my older siblings knew, who’d been a young wife.
– To a president would lie to people who trusted him and not give a damn how many thousands of people died because of him, Daddy shook his head, speechless in indignation.
– “It’s easy to love them when they are little” mom laughed, talking with a friend.
– Why did I continued for years, more than I would wish to admit, to send cards that were never answered? No one would ask this question who’s been disowned. Because you never give up. You never stop hoping.
– My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day.
– Eventually I gave up making cards. There was such childish hope in these cards, I began to feel pitiful even to myself like a dog whose tail is thump-thump-thumping long after everyone has abandoned him.
– Like a memory of having been poisoned by something youād eaten, barely managed to surviveāand yet here is the food again, and you are hungry.
– For it was not always clear, our mother knew: the distinction between commiseration and gloating.
Book 199
Cutest little short story, wrote by…a real fox š
– If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.
– Now all these happy sites and sounds seem like triks. Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping.
– And I woslike: O wow.
– It was just a strong feeling in my hart that it was no gud for Foxes to give up and just be ded on perpose.
– One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds.
– If there is fud, it shud be fud for all, rite?
– Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping. Every minit with no kikking and stomping now seems like not a real minit.
– So asked myself: What mite somewhat retreev the old and hope full me? And replyed: Some ansers.
Which is why I am riting this leter to you Yumans.
I wud like to know what is rong with you peeple.
Book 198
– Christine always wanted to know what was afoot, and any matter on which she was prevented from giving her opinion she took to be going badly.
– The time is still to come when it will be recognized that defiance itself summon misfortune out of nowhere.
– Hard by the church stood the public house; so often the two are closely conjoined, honorably sharing both joys and sorrows.
– Where there is great pride or great wealth, men soon come to believe that their appetites are their wisdom.
– Paint the Devil on the wall, and you will meet him in the flesh.
– Those who enter into relations with the Evil One, she said, will never rid of evil; if you give him a finger, your body and soul will belong to him.
– Their fear of the Devil’s plague was stronger than their fear of God.
– Yes, a person who is blind cannot even see the sun, and the person who is deaf cannot hear the thunder.
Book 197
**** The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising and gave to it neither power
nor time – Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
– Itās often only as beauty fades that it becomes apparent it was ever there
– Itās this freedom thatās the key to becoming visible again. Not caring what others think is freeing.
– Whenever my mum gets depressed about her age, she goes to Paris.
– Age has taught me that what other people think of me is none of my business.
– Once weāve grown used to the weight of loss and the impermanence of everything, something shifts.
– But Tilda knew how it felt to be discarded and alone, so she’d brought him one. On his papers, it said he was wary of all human interaction, but he’d jumped up onto her lap that very night and their three etes had locked. Tilda’s fears, stress, and worries, had all melted away, as if he’d drawn them out of her.
– Tilda’s mind was actually a complex palette of many shades, including deep anxiety azure. That, together with a vivid imagination violet, means that she was constantly worrying about something – her kids, the state of the world, the possibility of a zombie apocalypse.
– Her bedroom was the refuge she needed now. It was her retreat from the world.
– Early symptoms include not being served in shops and bars, and being overlooked at job interviews or for promotions at work.
– She recognized how much she’d given to him. And she was relieved that she no longer had to give.
– The gender health gap is alive and well. Just last week I saw that a famous footballer negotiated a new salary that’s infinitely more than this country’s entire funding for research into endometriosis.
– Everything feels better braless.
– Oh, she was there, but she wasn’t really there. Most of the time, she’d just been too busy watching all the balls she had in the air, afraid she would drop one. She never took time to understand how jugglin’ was meant to be fun.
– There are no perfect families, just perfect moments.
– If something can’t be seen, does it still exist?
– Often the question has no answers. Needed no answers. Asking the question was the point.
– You get what you focus on, Tilda.
– Listen to your internal dialogue, how you speak to yourself, the imagined conversations.
– Our thoughts shape our view of the world and yet we wake up each day and just let that old program of thoughts roll out and color our experiences.
– We look at the world around us and assign value to everything. We notice the things that are familiar or important, and often miss the things that aren’t.
– You’re a decent photographer, but those men were visionaries. The career you want is unrealistic and doesn’t pay the bills.
– Observe the thoughts, start watching them, but don’t be too attached to them and certainly don’t believe them.
– Also, a lot of men didn’t know the difference between you’re and your. “Even I won’t settle for that, and English isn’t my first language”
– “Does it mean you can’t see anything?” “That’s not the best question to ask, why don’t you ask what I can see?”
– We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
– My father gave me a camera and really encouraged me, so I threw myself into it. Initially I found it was a way to connect with him, but eventually it became a way to connect with myself.
– She realized she kept happiness at arm’s length, certain it would be snatched away if she dared to let it any closer.
– The problem is you’re afraid to acknowledge your own beauty. You’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.
– No, darling, you did this to yourself. He certainly played the role you cast him in, but the story is yours.
– Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
– Visualization is a tool that is commonly used by elite athletes. The brain doesn’t know the difference between a real event and an imagined one, so by imagining repetitive actions, such as getting that basketball through the hoop, an athlete can create new circuitry in the brain and yield a better outcome on the day of the game.
– There’s a Zen saying that you should meditate for twenty minutes a day unless you’re extremely busy, in which case you should meditate for an hour.
– It’s time for women to stop being politely angry.
– Never look back unless you’re planning to go that way.
– Tilda sat on the grass in the garden and stared at the world around her. Or, rather, she sat in the world.
– We never know if were doing something we love for the last time, so I savor each moment and appreciate tit as if I am.
– Why work so hard in her relationship with him, but not on the one with herself?
– Love yourself as I love you. Fiercely.
– Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Book 196
– āIn the future, you might not want to wear so much makeup. You donāt want to attract the wrong kind of attention.ā Maureenās shoulders tightened. āWhy donāt you tell them to stop looking instead of us to stop shining?ā
– Men in packs can do terrible things, things they wouldnāt have the hate to do alone. Itās no excuse, just something you should know.
– In our neighborhood, the problem wasnāt the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth.
– Youāll recognize those men, the ones inclined to their dark side, because theyāll expect you to carry their load. Theyāll smother your anger with their pain, theyāll make you doubt yourself, and theyāll tell you they love you the whole time. Some do it big, like Ed, but most do it in quiet steps, like your father.
– Thereās also the truth that 70 percent of serial killer victims are female. You better believe that knowing youāre prey heightens your interest in the predator. You find yourself desperate to make sense of largely random acts of serial murder, believing that if you can understand motivation and hunting patterns, you can protect yourself.
– “Smile girls, you’ll look so much prettier.” “I’ll damn well decide for myself when I’m ready to smile.”
– stared across the crackling fire at Brenda, the glow lighting up her heart-shaped face. My love for her was carved into my bones.
– Sheād cracked like a mirror after, and her pieces were so sharp, none of us could get close enough to put her back together again.
– Maureen was more alive than any of us. She protected kids from bullies. When men catcalled her, sheād catcall back. Sheād demanded we pierce her ears first because she was Maureen.
– Was it contagious, the emptiness I felt? Was he worried heād catch it?
– You canāt live in the dark and feel good about yourself.
Book 195
– Wanting to know things and do things is what the human race is all about. Exploration, Gwendy! Both the disease and the cure!
– You can if things, until you go crazy, my girl.
– The world is insane. You only have to watch the news to know it.
– Secrets are a problem, maybe the biggest problem of all. They weigh on the mind and take up space in the world.
– I’m no longer in Castle Rock, Gwendy thinks. I’ve entered one of those places I like to read about. Oz or Narnia or Hobbiton. This can’t be happening.
– How much is her own doing, and how much the doing of the box with its treats and buttons?
Book 194
– Survival is insufficient.
– Hell is the absence of the people you long for.
– First we only want to be seen, but once weāre seen, thatās not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
– No one ever thinks theyāre awful, even people who really actually are. Itās some sort of survival mechanism.
– What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more youāve lost.
– They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.
– A fragment for my friend. If your soul left this earth I would follow and find you
Silent, my starship suspended in night.
– It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.
– The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?
– We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.
– A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films.
– There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine.
– It is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.
Book 193
– Belief should be a conscious choice, not something youāre brainwashed into when youāre too young to understand or question it. Faith isnāt something you pass down like an heirloom.
– Why do we hate our girls so much that history echoes with their screams and the earth is pitted with their unmarked graves?
– You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly judge a person by their books.
– The Old Testament is crap. Itās full of misogyny, torture and inconsistencies. Jesus preached about love. All love.
– Flo isnāt really a huge fan of social media. She doesnāt like how everyone pretends they have an amazing life or how they filter their faces a zillion times so they donāt even look human. Itās all false and fake.
– Your past is a part of you. It trails at your heels like a faithful old dog, refusing to leave your side. And sometimes, it bites your arse.
– Or perhaps all adults feel like that at times. Like weāre just playing at being grown-up, but inside weāre still children, shuffling around in oversized clothes, wishing someone would tell us that monsters donāt exist.
– Bad memories are like splinters. Sometimes painful, but you learn to live with them. The problem is, they always work their way to the surface eventually.
– Comfort always dispels rage more quickly than shouting does.
– Although we can never really ease trauma, our mind is good at repairing it, layering over it with new experiences, like fresh skin growing over an old wound. The scar remains. It just hurts less and becomes harder to see.
– Never have children, a friend once told me. Not if you want to finish a cup of coffee, get to see the end of a film or enjoy a full nightās sleep ever again.
– Faith, to an extent, is a placebo. If you believe it works, it works.
– I think we have the capacity for good and evil. But for some, one side is more prevalent than the other.
– You want to believe the world is black and white. But, as an adult, you realise that most people exist in the grey area in between. All stuck in the middle and bumbling through.
– Sometimes, trying to fill a silence just makes it heavier.
– And I remind myself that old age is not a disease but a destination.
Book 192
– How does anyone know whatās true or real? Things we once accepted as facts are now accepted as being wrong. The earth is not flat, smoking isnāt good for us, Pluto isnāt a planet, witches werenāt burnt at the stake in Salem, and humans have more than five senses. Everything has a half-lifeāeven facts.
– Some parents expect too much of their children and others expect too little. Both can be equally damaging.
– Wrongdoing is an absence of something good rather than something fated or written in our DNA or forced upon us by shitty parents or careless teachers or cruel friendships. Evil is not a state; it is a āproperty,ā and when a person is in possession of enough āproperty,ā it sometimes begins to define them.
– To misquote Mark Twain: It isn’t what we don’t know that gets us into trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just isn’t so.
– Maybe that’s what’s keeping me awake – the choices.
– Chance is a random outcome in the real world whereas luck is the value we place upon it when we label it good or bad.
– Guilt has to fall somewhere when logic fails.
– Salvation is available on a weekly payment planāall credit cards accepted.
Book 191
– I wanted more time with the books. I wanted to spend the day in a quiet corner, sitting against a window, lost in words and worlds I had never been given access to
– They had stripped us of everything we were taught made us women, and then told us we were mad.
– I sought to puncture Heaven and instead discovered Hell.
– It was easier to rage than to despair.
– Sometimes we were strangers even to ourselves.
– Not being blameless is not the same as being guilty.
– I, however, was perfectly aware of my beauty. I considered it a skill, alongside speaking French, English, Italian and German. It was a language of its own, in a way. One that translated well in different circumstances.
– I have been stuck in the business of books for so long, I forgot how much fun being a part of a story can be.
Book 190
– There was no normal. There never had been. “Normal” and “natural” were the biggest lies we’d ever created.
– Nothingās worse than a story without an end.
– I looked at him and he looked at me. A moment. A choice. My choice. His choice.
– There are certain things in life that you never forget. Things that dig deep, things that nest in the hadal zone.
– Knowledge is dangerous. Once you know something, you can’t get rid of it. You have to carry it. Always.
– Because I donāt know whether honesty is better than happiness. Do we sacrifice honesty in order to be happy?
– They’d branded me like some kind of animal. Lower than an animal. A number.
Book 189
– You don’t owe anyone your whole story.
– I am not responsible for the fake version of me you created in your head.
– An insult doesnāt have the intended impact when spelled incorrectly.
– Itās better to be interesting than likable.
– Some people will never believe you no matter how hard you explain yourself. Trust me, there’s no pleasing people. If they’re determined to think the worst of you, they will.
– And people hate that quality in a young woman, donāt they? They donāt know what to do with a girl who isnāt looking for their approval. They feel like they have to bring her down a peg.
– Make Today So Awesome That Yesterday Gets Jealous.
– She wasnāt interested in making other people comfortable, which I really liked about her.
– Sometimes I think about the fact that the twenty-two-year-old version of me would be absolutely horrified by almost-thirty me.
– Iām showing up unannounced, which is a real dick move, especially since she has kids, but Iāve lost all my fucks. I have no more to give.
– Loose hugs and tight smiles.
– Men don’t protect us, not really. They only protect themselves, or each other. The only thing men ever protected me from was happiness.
– Dadās so good at that Texas thing where you act polite to peopleās face and then talk shit behind their back.
Book 188
– You were born here! It is something you can never lose. Don’t forget that.
– Growing up, Dolores asked me, over and over “what are the rules to live in America?” I didn’t understand why, but I knew the answer well: Speak English in front of strangers. No Spanish anywhere outside the house.
– Sex with Richard felt akin to leaving a copy of myself behind with him. I didn’t want to have that experience of loss too many more times.
– I don’t live for my daughter. I live to never let her doubt for a moment that she is loved and she can be fearless.
– “Aren’t both your parents Mexicans?” I knew Kevin was – he couldn’t pass for anything but – yet wasn’t sure about Cynthia. Alex said “They are”. But they don’t mean US”. “Which us?” I don’t understand.
– – “You enjoyed college?” she asked me, “You can thank me as a taxpayer who helped pay for your education. No offense”. “oh” I said again. What I thought was I went to a private school on a scholarship and I owe you nothing.
– I thought these men had strong opinions, when in fact they were simply opinionated – They couldn’t be moved.
– The country and state flags were at half-staff again because of a new mass shooting, but I didn’t remember which one. I couldn’t keep track of when the mourning period of one calamity ended and a new tragedy’s grief began. It was easier to lower a flag than imagine a screaming child’s last breath. I had much less trouble imagining it.
– A year into my employment, I learned I made 35% less than my white male counterparts. 5 years and a promotion later, I made 50% less.
– Brenda saved me from becoming someone who would stand out, a person who would call attention to themselves. I nourished this idea like a flame, retreating further into myself and my books.
– You’re safe here, just as long as you blend in, nice and easy.
– Finally, someone who will love our unlovable, unlikeable, always complaining, impossible to please daughter.
– The quiet in the wall’s shadow was peaceful, not the way I experienced “quiet” growing up in my neighborhood. There, quiet was noisy, too.
– Perhaps my father’s apathy was the secret to happiness.
– When an African American family with three teenagers toured the house, she asked Todd’s husband to put the Mexican dance party standard “La Chona” on repeat, loud. “They never came back”, Rebekah said, “So I guess blacks must have some unresolved cultural issues with us, too, right? You can’t teach bad people how to make good decisions”.
– A small Italian town on the shore of Lake Como. Layered into the valley of a steep mountain, the town’s residents get no direct sun for five months and are known by locals in neighboring towns as “shadow crazy”.
– “Iris, huh?” Lena said. “I love your name” wow, I thought. Radiant. “We’re gonna be friends” Lena said “But you need to pale up”
– You are beyond medium, not not native. Espresso, maybe. We want you a shade like exotic.
– The unbranded, these voices clarified, were different from the bandless, law-abiding whites who could get a band but chose not to surrender their freedom to the government.
– “You and Alex voted for this shiut, didn’t you?” It wasn’t about me, I thought. The names were never supposed to be about me.
– Sometimes losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.
Book 187
– Fairy tales are horror stories.
– Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didnāt know who she was. Many children donāt know who they will be, and thatās not unusual, but what was unusual in this case was that the girl was willing to trade who she was for who she could be, so she began to do just that. Little by little, she replaced herself with parts of other people she liked better. Parts of stories she wanted to live. Nobody lied like this girl. She believed her own stories so completely, she forgot which ones were true and which were false.
If youāve ever heard of a cuckoo bird, they lay their eggs in other birdsā nests, so those birds are forced to raise them for their own. This girl was her own cuckoo, laying stories in her own head, and the heads of those around her, until even she couldnāt remember which ones were true, or if there was anything left of her.ā
Book 186
– To every bird, his nest is beautiful – Italian Provers
– No more visible than the notes of nightingale song. No more audible than a wordless wish. The tiny god has released a cipher.
– Padre Francesco is a plump man of God, blessed with biblical black eyebrows like two Pekingese guarding the temples of his bald head.
– As a young woman, she was self conscious of her curves, of every eye tracing her silhouette. At 53, she couldn’t give a flying fig about what any eye is up to,
– But the demanding days of accomplishment and accumulation are gone. As the years go by, she wants to take less and appreciate more. All the tiny miracles she missed in her youth. Slow down and savor the fragrance of every flower.
– And Milan, well, her Elisabetta ius in Milan, so it had better behave itself or it will have Giuseppina to contend with.
– “My coffee is the fuel of this village! The elixir of life! It is why everyone here lives into their late nineties!! “Yes, it is essentially formaldehyde; you are preserving them all. Taxidermy worked in much the same way!”
– Time trickles slowly in Tuscan towns, a glowing golden sap.
– A big city allows you to be anonymous, to slink among the streetlights, endlessly reinventing yourself under storefronts and neon signs. But in a tiny tight-knit village – try as you might – you can never hide from who you are.
– Nonna Amara shuffles slowly in her slippers, but how fast those thick fingers are. They fly towards a check to stroke it, prodrib in suggestion of a second serving, hold you so hard and so tenderly in a hug that your worries become weightless.
– A tightness in the brow tells Aria that her person needs calming. She will not give in the gritty mystery of the dark words. Not yet. Not until all is right with her person.
– When a dog chooses to love a human, it is a timeless affair of the soul and spirit, a meeting far beyond the mortal body. An eternal entanglement is this mingling of the souls. A loyalty beyond language and all of life’s earthly matter.
– How humbling to face a forest as a mere human, a shrunken statue worshipping at the shrine of nature.
– This moment is the best moment of this life, only to be topped by the next moment and the next.
– When he has somewhere to walk off his horror after talking to the police, after his car had been spray painted with hateful words. All because of loving someone. How could such a personal act merit persecution?
– He thunders towards his person, who he thinks has just called his name, but he’s never sure because really he’s not much of a listener, but how lovely, here comes another moment with his person!
– His blood pressure medication is at home – he never needs to be it on a hunt. Ironic thing, really; there aren’t any medicines that work for a broken heart. Hunting for truffles is the closest thing to a cure.
– He inevitably thinks about poison. Shitters are always green because it was a trend and a trick from the 18th century when the colorant of arsenic was used to paint them in an attempt to ward off mosquitos.
– Where there be treasure, there be pirates.
– “Besides, you won’t be rid of me that easily” Paolo stared dreamily out of the window “I’ll be in the breeze. I’ll be in the songs of birds and bright shivers through the leaves., I’ll be right here…”
– He sometimes remembers the never-ending hours of a single day biking around his home village as a boy. Now, the world is moving faster, and he is moving slower.
– We must create a visual extravaganza on every plate because we humans smell in color.
– He imagine she smelled of a wished-upon a star. The heady poison of her perfume, dismantling him slowly. Death by hibiscus and honey. She is bread and warm butter.
– You left me with no other option. I will always side with the angels.
– Umberto feels adrift without Giuseppina. He is homesick for this woman.
– Love foams through her. Lemon Bright.
– She is holding the village together with her heart, loving everyone out loud.
– May we eat well, drink well, and enjoy every minute of life. It is after all the Italian way.
– You’re so young to give yourself to someone. Let Italy hold your heart for a while. First, you fall in love with life, and in time, with yourself. Live your life for you first.
– Significant beings are sometimes born of humble beginnings.
– Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
Fears don’t prevent death. They prevent life.
– Grief is a tax. One you pay if you were lucky enough to love.
– Loss brings everything into focus, doesn’t fragile beauty of life. A desire to live fiercely. It sweeps away the first of anything unimportant, exposes the truth. The wolves know how to live in harmony with the land that nurtures them. They are thriving.
Book 185
– She could think I was tougher than that, even though I wasn’t, even though the whole reason I did it was because I was weak in the first place, a person who couldn’t stand the simple act of being herself.
– I liked to listen to the radio. Talk shows, the oldies. The voices made me feel less empty.
– I couldn’t get back into my body. I couldn’t stop seeing myself as a stranger.
– So I ignored her. I became what I wanted. I became a bitch. I became cool.
– I tried to interrupt a few times, saying I was having a hard time just making it to school, but she barely looked at me before going back to her original train of thought.
– To my parents, I had become an abstract problem, a plumbing leak or a lingering cough.
– He told me that I was bipolar, type I, rapid cycling. I liked the specificity in those phrases. I liked that the thing wrong with me had a name now.
– I heard God a few times too. I thought it was God, at least. She had a female voice and never had a lot to say.
I grabbed a handful, shoved them in my mouth, swallowed them with the gin, until it was all gone. They went down my throat so easy it was like they belonged there.
– Suicidality was nearly twice as likely when pediatric patients were placed on antidepressants versus a placebo.
– I didn’t know who any of the other students were, and none of them knew me. I was any old kid. Not crazy. Just weird.
– She’d asked me if I knew what a condom was. I said yes, thinking she was stupid, because, as I told her, I lived in one. My answer made her laugh and laugh. It took two years before I figured out why.
– It made me want to carve out the part of myself that was defective, like a gangrenous limb. My problem didn’t seem bad enough to justify all that I’d done to myself.
– It was strange how someone could disappear from your life like that. In a few short months, Nicole had gone from the center of my orbit to a dot so far away it didn’t matter anymore.
– I wanted to jump into it, to become it, forget my name. Not die. A desire to be a void, not a person.
– I was broken.
– It made me feel like what I was: someone removed from society, who was therefore only able to see a tiny reflection of the outside world. The fireworks were small and far away but they were beautiful, because it turns out society is something that looks best from a distance.
– When I went to sleep that night, I closed my eyes, my own breath settling into the rhythm of Alyson’s, and for the first time since I’d arrived at the school, I didn’t feel alone.
– I sat there thinking about how I’d tried to kill myself and how I’d really meant it, but now I was really glad I’d fucked that up. I didn’t want to be dead and rotting yet.
– I’d heard pi meat was the closest thing to human meat, and it was easy to see the truth in that.
– He told us that we didn’t have to like or relate to everything we heard. The point was to pay attention to the parts that sounded like us. “It is like a cafeteria. Take what you need, and leave the rest behind”.
– You know, there’s good in everything. It’s just sometimes you have to dig a little harder to get it out.
– You’re sensitive. And that means extra pain, extra loneliness, extra sadness. But it also means extra joy.
– And finally I realized how transitory everything was: people in, people out, a revolving door for teen problems. My absence hadn’t created a hole.
– Once I arrived, I ran to the shower to get in before all the others, turned the water scorching hot. As the water pelted me I felt clean and pure. My body something to use rather than destroy.
Book 184
– Humans do a good job of making outcasts.
– Dogs are the worst. They’ll sell you out for a treat and a pat on the head.
– Donāt swim with the dolphins during a labor dispute. No matter how much they try to convince you otherwise.
– āI canāt tell if youāre joking with me,ā I said. āIām mostly joking with you.ā āThat āmostlyā is doing a lot of work in that sentence.ā
– I didnāt need another cat. At this point in my brilliant career as an itinerant educator I could barely afford to feed myself. But then, no one ever needs a cat these days. Thatās not why we have cats. We have cats because they amuse us and because otherwise our clothes would lack the texture only cat hair can provide.
– āCan we start with the cat?ā I asked, sitting. CATS, Hera typed. PERSEPHONE IS MY INTERN. Persephone looked at me and mewed. āPaid internship, I hope,ā I joked. OF COURSE, Hera typed back. WEāRE ANIMALS, NOT MONSTERS. I paused. āDo you actually get paid?ā I asked my cat. YES. āHow much?ā MORE THAN YOU.ā
– āDid you train that cat to attack people?ā Jacobs asked. āNo,ā I said. āSheās just a good judge of character.ā
– āMaybe Iām just better with cats than people, and cats seem to know that.ā āThatās the toxoplasmosis talking.ā āIām sure it is.ā
– A stupid villain threatens, Charlie. A smarter villain offers a service.
– Jake looked better now, dead, than I did, alive. Certainly less stressed.
– āSo weāre like Spotify, but for evil.ā āWeāre much less evil than Spotify. We actually pay a living wage to the people whose work weāre selling.ā
– āSo now what?ā I said. āNeither of us can get that gun, and if you try to attack me my cat will murder you.ā āIām thinking,ā Jacobs said. āYouāre bleeding,ā I said. āI can do both.ā
– Everyone who could make someone elseās day worse, but tries to make it better instead. Thank you. Itās more important than you think.
Book 183
My streak of picking awesome books completely at random has ended. Adua wasn’t necessarily bad, but I believe it may have been lost in translation. Literally. From Italian. It was a little curious that the novel was about Italy and Somalia, during Mussolini’s fascism.
Anyway…I found it hard to finish.
– Look at the stars and then at their reflection in the basin. In that light, you will find yourself.
– Let me make my own mistakes in peace.
– Their hopes painted in the sky…
– It makes him forget the tranquilizers they put in the bland soup at the immigration center.
– When many of us came to this strange peninsula it wasn’t the Euro that captured our dreams, it was still the Lira, the beautiful lira that intoxicated with promises of wealth.
Zoppe knew that the best escape route was through his head. That was the place where he found all the lost scents of his childhood.
– I looked at Papa with a silent plea for help. He broke eye contact and at that moment I realized he was rejecting me.
– Tell the stories you have, as best as you can.
– Meanwhile the book did a polka in my green bag. Happy to have a new owner, a new house, a new reader.
– The lionesses’ stride was that of precarious nobility fighting against scarcity and bullets. The stride of a queen whose crown has been stolen by a male.
– “For the perpetual glory of Rome”m was inscribed on the base. For me, reading that inscription made me long for that faraway Rome, full of la dolce vita and cabaret. I didn’t understand fascism there.
– I wanted to dream, dance, fly. I wanted to escape. Italy was everywhere in my life.
– Get all your photo novels and bring them to me. We’ll burn them. We’ll make a nice bonfire. That way you’ll see what happens with love. Love, my child, always goes up in smoke.
– Was bringing out some hairy old cunt all it took to convince them that Benito Mussolini’s war was good and just?
– “Our conscience” she used to say, “has a face”.
Book 182
– All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
– Embrace diversity. Unite Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.
– There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
– Thatās all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I donāt know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that wonāt matter if we donāt survive these times.
– Freedom is dangerous but it’s precious, too. You can’t just throw it away or let it slip away. You can’t sell it for bread and pottage.
– Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped “the company.” I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it always is.
– Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.
– My God doesnāt love me or hate me or watch over me or know me at all, and I feel no love for or loyalty to my God. My God just is.
– Belief – Initiates and guides action – Or it does nothing.
– They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.
– Itās better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. Itās harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.
– Weāll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us.
– Why canāt I do what others have doneāignore the obvious. Live a normal life. Itās hard enough just to do that in this world.
– Iām still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.
– All struggles Are essentially power struggles. Who will rule, Who will lead, Who will define, refine, confine, design, Who will dominate. All struggles Are essentially power struggles, And most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.
Book 181
This was a great story, but I had to take a break in between cause it dragged for a while. I came back fresh to read the end š
– For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.
– āNone of us are truly good,ā the vicar said, at last. He put a hand on her shoulder, so gently, so kindly, and she almost threw up on the spot. āAll we can do is live by the light we are given.ā āSome of us donāt have any light,ā Devon said. āHow are we supposed to live, then?ā
– Love doesn’t have a cost. It’s just a choice you make, the way you choose to keep breathing or keep living. It’s not about worth and it’s not about price. Those concepts don’t apply.
– Maybe, Devon thought, that was the best anybody could hope for in life: to be missed when gone, however one had lived.
– Hope was a thing you lost when simply trying to imagine better days became so exhausting, overwhelming, and depressing a task, that one opted for despair out of sheer weariness. Giving up brought a kind of peace.
– Her children were fires who needed fueling; she would burn anything and everything to keep them going.
– Self-hate was intrinsic to the entire human race. Heād come to that conclusion after his various dealings with humans. When they could not find enough to dislike in their own selves, human folk went looking for flaws in their neighbors. Delicious, that tendency.
– That tongue of yours. Lots of people commented on Devonās tongue. She stuck it out, sometimes, inspecting it in the mirror. There was nothing special about her tongue that she could ever see.
– The lesson is in the story, my dear.
– You will never have to fear what you have mastered.
– Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the hearth to keep you warm. Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.
– Memory was an anchor. It could ground you in a storm, keep you from drifting. But anchors could also weigh you down and keep you from sailing free.
Book 180
A short story that packs more than most books
– Iām . . . no expert. But I think most people who want to be happy try to add things to their lives. But really what maybe they should be doing is taking something away.
– This is a very provoking thing to the world. Because people arenāt supposed to be happy, theyāre only supposed to want to be happy, because how otherwise are you supposed to be able to sell things to them?
– Love isnāt powerful enough. But spite? Spite can change the world.
– Being smart is the worst thing one can be in modern society. All it ever means is more work.
– Because a funny thing about rule-loving people is that to them it seems more important to impose punishment than it is to actually solve problems, and a funny thing about rule-breaking people is that they seem to find breaking rules a lot easier to do if someone else has broken them first.
– Donāt look on the internet for someone who is exactly like you. Look for someone who isnāt. Love is not to never fight. Love is always making up.
– Because the doctors and nurses understand very well that all the modern pills and treatments are surely great, but sometimes what people really need most of all is a prescription for a break.
– Heās just happy. It wasnāt even particularly difficult. All he did was to remove the one thing that makes almost all people unhappy: other people. Whatever they want, the answer is no.
– Youāre fortunate, Lucas. You view loneliness as taking people away. But for most of us, loneliness is just adding more loneliness.
– If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and thatās how wars start.
– By observing these married couples through his window on Sundays, Lucas has noticed that they often consist of a monkey and a bird, and they have decided to go for a nice stroll together. But the monkey canāt fly, so the bird has to walk. And after a while the monkey gets very annoyed with the bird, because the bird walks so very slowly. So then the bird suggests that maybe it can fly above the monkey instead? And then the monkey gets very, very hurt and says: āOh! Excuse me then for wanting us to do something together.
– But then again, Lucas has never loved a cat, so what does he really know about life?
– Therefore, to avoid your neighbors, you have to make yourself uninteresting, but not too uninteresting, because that makes you interesting.
– The cruelest form of interpersonal terrorism: small talk.
– Any middle manager on the planet could of course have told him that this is a terrible decision, because the truth about problems is that the problem itself is never actually the problem. Itās always the people involved who are the problem.
– I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what Iām capable of!
– Itās not that Lucas hates other people. He just really enjoys being where ot
Book 179
It’s like…3.5….
– I grab a book. I sit in the corner. My eyes fall on the page, and I disappear into the ink.
– Maybe joy is even more potent when you’ve known the depth of its opposite.
– Love is an excruciating delicacy. Maybe that is its force.
– Life, it keeps going. That’s pretty much all it is when you boil it down: perpetual motion.
– Funny how we’re not just our features, we’re the areas between.
– Itās like, mind and body work in tandem, so she thinks sheās sick and then she convinces herself and it manifests in her body, so she actually is sick at this point. Her fake Lyme disease has totally crippled her for real.
– It would be amazing if there were a reason for all this. A reason for her misfortune, a reason for her captivity and abuse, a reason for her return. I’m skeptical at first as we steep in the contemplative silence. But then I remember reasons are human inventions.
Book 178
He is totally talking about me here: A number of readers admitted to knowing that Chasing the Boogeyman was a work of fiction when they first started turning the pages, only to eventually find themselves taking a break in order to Google names and places and incidents to verify their actual existence.
– Stephen King once wrote: āI never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?
– So yes, you could say that my twelve-year-old brain was busy. But there was another reason I so often chose such a solitary existence. I’d learned that it was easier to find magic when no one else was around.
– I am amazed at how those memories differ, what time and wishful thinking have done to our youth. Once again, I’m reminded that the past is a tricky beast and not to be trusted.
Sometimes you just have to accept things the way they are and move on. Otherwise, you lose the best part if yourself by never allowing yourself to be happy…or content…or at peace.
– Some of the inmates have a kind of vibration about them. It almost feels like when you are too close to a transformer and your little hairs start tingling? There’s a buzz there, a nasty one.
– I wish I could explain to you how we were before, but I can’t, because the before is so filmy and shadowed by the after.
– When faced with the choice of doing the right thing or the easy thing, always do the right thing, no matter how difficult it is.
– Iād never done well with crying women. They scared me.
Book 177
I picked this up for obvious reasons (says the girl from Milan)
– I considered the girl from Milan to be the mold on which all my future girlfriends were based, that she was a kind of prototype.
– I was like parsley in soup, chopped parsley, I was everywhere.
– So why do you want to die? I told her I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to spend a little time dead and then get back up.
– People who work, Mimi, are never bad, she taught me. It’s the people who don’t work, who get fat off the labors of others who are pieces of shit, and there are so many of them out there!
– Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up.
– I was unlike all the other foolish blackbirds in the world who sang the same dopey song because I sang with an uncommon beauty that no one but her could hear.
– The accent was clearly foreign. no one from Naples, not even Lello, spoke Italian like that.
– Usually, my letters didn’t have a clear recipient, I sent both prose and poems to the entire human race. But on that particular occasion, at the top of the page, I wrote: for the girl from Milan.
– Today my grandchildren kill and are killed in intense games of Virtual Reality. We used to pretend to kill and get killed on the floor of our homes, out on the street, and in the courtyards of our buildings in a dangerous blur of reality and fiction, where, if we opened the wrong door or went down the wrong alley, we could have easily found ourselves face-to-face with actual weapons.
– As well as proper undergarments, artfully repaired over the years, because she didn’t want to die in the street and have people discover her dressed inappropriately.
– I came to the perhaps excessive conclusion that although practically everything having to do with the girl from Milan was gone, I realized that the girl and her voice existed inside my head.
– If my girlfriend ever called my name, I should never say not now, I’m busy, maybe later, because for her, later was always wrong.
– She ended up inside the noise in her head.
– I took out a piece of paper and pen and wrote: do you mind if, for the rest of my life, I continue to call you the girl from Milan?
– I’d always been a loner by nature, and socializing with friends and strangers alike, even the wonderfully supportive group of readers I’ve been blessed with, took a lot out of me.
Book 176
This was definitely different, or at least for me, a noob on this genre…I kept wondering if it was a real story despite the author saying twice it wasn’t and me Googling it twice š
– The author J. R. R. Tolkien had a word for that feelingāeucatastrophe. The opposite of catastrophe, and all the more important because itās even rarer.
– Maybe thatās what grieving is all about: never forgetting what weāve lost.
– Innocence once lost, can never be regained. Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost.
– If I was shadows and moonbeams and tales of death and horror, she was sunshine and laughter and the yellow brick road from The Wizard of Oz . We balanced each other.
– When a monster is finally caught against all odds, it feels like magic.
– According to a 2009 study conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nearly 16 percent of American serial killers were adopted as children, while adoptees represent only 2 percent of the general population.
– This is what you do when you have a family. You get up when it’s still dark outside and you go to work so the people you love can have a better life. Even when you’re sick or tired and don’t want to.
Book 175
– Become too smart, and you will become arrogant. Too strong, and you will be challenged. Too kind, and you will be exploited.
– Pandora wasn’t evil, after all. She hadn’t intended to unleash suffering into the world. She’d simply needed to know what was inside the box.
– Their relationship was unique, a once-in-a-lifetime connection, and she wanted to protect it from anything that might alter or taint it.
– She was attracted to, and afraid of, her impulse toward destruction, the damage she could do to her own soft, vulnerable flesh.
– Rehearse your death every morning and night. Only when you live as though already dead will you find freedom.
– The horror of what humanity was capable of inflicting filled him with dread.
– Restrictions were meant for those who didn’t have the skills to break them.
– We aren’t a mobile society. In Japan, a home will remain in a family for generations. Family altars are there; childhood memories are there. We don’t leave them behind. We can’t.
– He knew that brilliant men like Stephen Hawking gave humanity a one-in-twenty chance of surviving AI.
– It was the nature of the system to colonize, consume, destroy.
– A hard childhood does that, I suppose. Makes one a fighter.
– Let your opponent do the work, she’d said. Let him come at you. Evasion is often more effective than aggression.
– The most challenging puzzle you will ever confront is yourself.
– It reads “ware tada taru wo shiru”, she said “Which means: All one must learn is to be content”.
– All we have to learn in this life is to be satisfied with what we are, with ourselves. We are enough. You are enough. Nothing you can solve, nothing you can do, will change that. It is the greatest challenge, but it also brings the greatest reward.
Book 174
3.5…I think I may have liked it more if I didn’t just read Lola in The Mirror…
– My mother was a cup of sugar. You could borrow her any time.
– I couldn’t understand. She knew all the songs, so why would she get messed and stirred up with this man?
– I was raised in a car and, when you live in a car, you’re not worried about storms and lightning, you are afraid of a tow truck.
– My mother would recount her day at the veteran’s hospital. Those men are hurt and angry, but they’re full of the national anthem.
– If you were living in a car, it means you were just pretending you were not a bag lady living under a bridge. People were always thinking homelessness was contagious.
– Of course you never asked him for money. You don’t even need to answer my stupid question. People think that runaways have no pride but we’re full of pride like a pride bank.
– If you don’t dream at night then only this life matters. There’s nowhere else to go.
– My mother never told me to do anything except to make sure I had some dreams when I went to sleep.
– But sweetness is always looking for Mr. Bad and Mr. Bad can pick upMiss Sweet in any crowd, just like magnets.
– I wish I’d been your friend and now it’s too late. Who knows where you’re going to live now. It’s afterwards when we wish we’d been kind.
– There’s two other shoots staying here now. We call you children shoots because your parents were shot.
– Pearl, Leo said. If there is anything that I have and you want it, you can have it. I don’t want you to want something. It’s awful to be wanting and wanting.
– Maybe every person’s last word had importance. They were the fulls top on a life.
– Leo said, if you are a foster child and you have a fever, no one touches your forehead to feel your heat. All they do is hand you a thermometer.
– Wedding dresses and shrouds come from Heaven, Corazon said. You can’t control when those clothes will wear you.
– There are no divorced women in my town. There are only widows. This is the way men know they need to behave good.
– Do you miss people you never knew? Yes, I said. I never knew anyone.
– If it hadn’t been for my life, I know I would have been somebody, Corazon said.
– Lay among the guns and knew I lat among the deaths that had been and the deaths that were coming.
– How can I miss you if you don’t go away?
– Dreaming is cheap. It doesn’t cost a thing. In dreams you don’t have to pay the bills or pay the rent. In dreams you can buy a house and be loved back.
– You think you get a dose of tragedy and that’s that. You think it can’t get any worse and that you’re saved now. But tragedy is not like medicine. You don’t get a dose like a pill or a spoonful. Tragedy always kicks in.
– Eli Redmond is the breeze that makes a hurricane form in the Atlantic.
– We lived a dot-to-dot life, never thinking too much about the future.
Book 173
Oh wow! What a book. It will stay with me…
– She told me to tell you love is not a feeling. It’s a sacrifice.
– The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl.
– I told everyone a boy was born, she said. If I were a girl then I would be stolen.
– As soon as someone heard the sound of an SUV approaching, or saw a black dot in the distance or two or three black dots, all girls ran to the holes.
– Our men crossed the river to the United States. They dipped their feet in the water and waded up to their waists but they were dead when they got to the other side.
– Son of a bitch, my mother said again and again, for years. She never said his name again. He was Song of a Bitch forever after.
– Of course, the USA-to Mexico rumor road was the most powerful rumor route in the whole world. If you did not know the truth, you knew the rumor and the rumor was always a lot, lot more than the truth.
– Don’t ever pray for love and health, Mother said. Or money. If God Hears what you really want He will not give it to you. Guaranteed. When my father left my mother said, Get down on your knees and pray for spoons.
– If you are going to kill me tomorrow, you might as well kill me today.
Always be the cook, she said. Never let anyone cook for you.
The truth was we knew the cause behind the deformities on our mountains. Everyone knew that the spraying of poisons to kill the crops of Marijuana and poppies was harming our people.
– When we looked at him, we looked at ourselves. Every imperfection our skin scars, things we had never even noticed, we saw in him.
Jose Rosa tasted like glass windows, cement, and elevators to the moon.
That day all anyone could hear was the silence of cell phones. That was it. It was the sound of Paula stolen. That was the song.
I could see the cigarette-burn stars that made up Orion and Taurus. Even her feet were covered in round burns. Paula had walked through the Milky Way and every star had burned her body.
– Everything looked as if Paula and her mother were about to return. Yes, my mother said. This is how you disappear: as if you’re going to appear.
I closed my hands into fists so that I would not start to count the amount of people we had lost on my fingers.
– Luna said, can you believe that there are only 26 letters to say everything? There are only 26 letters to talk about love and jealousy and God.
– Listen, there is no way I want to be buried in a cemetery with all those dead people.
– She sleeps because she prefers dreams, not because she is tired.
– If I had shoes would I give them to her? I knew I probably wouldn’t. In only a few days the jail had modified me. I thought about what Violeta had said earlier, how people outside forgot you in only three days.
The ground here is so cold, she said. Yes, in this place even the sun is cold.
Book 172
– I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.
– I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
– Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.
– Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.
– Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.
– Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.
– Books were safer than other people anyway.
– You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.
– Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.
– I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.
– Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.
– Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and then put them in tins, and make them revolting.
– This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.
Book 171
– If all you ever see is reality, you just want to die.
– Peopleās lives never stay the same colour forever. There are times when the colour of life changes completely.
– I began to understand that we were born in order to see and listen to the world. And that’s all this world wants of us. It doesn’t matter that I was never a teacher or a member of the workforce, my life had meaning.
– If I were not here, this full moon would not be here. Neither would the trees. Or the wind. If my view of the world disappears, then everything that I see disappears too. Itās as simple as that.
– When I hear stars whispering at night I feel part of the eternal flow of time.
– The world hasnāt changed. Itās just as cruel as it always was.
– She said that was the only way for us to live, to be like the poets.
– That’s why I made confectionery. I made sweet things for all those who lived with the sadness of loss. And that’s how I was able to live out my life.
Book 170
Hated it
Book 169
Fav book I read in 2024. I could quote the whole thing!
– And I thought to myself in that moment that this remarkable interaction had only come about because Iād decided to cartwheel to H&M, because Iād decided to choose wonder. And thatās just about as close to the point of it as I can get. Do I want to walk through this life of mine? Or do I want to cartwheel through it?
– I’ll never give up another chance to tell the people I love how I feel about them.
– My mother danced the Tyrannosaurus Waltz. It is the dance of mothers and their monsters.
– The dance requires a young mother to hold her baby to her chest and stand before the monster who pretends to love them.
– Mirror, Mirror on the grass, what’s my future? What’s my past?
– Sometimes it’s good to settle for the side-mirror view of life. Sometimes we don’t want to see the full picture.
– Acid monster blood. My dad’s blood coulda cleaned your oven.
– Mum never told me where she was born or how, or who her parents were. The past is dangerous for girls on the lam. I think she was born from a rock fertilized by a rainbow. My rock fertilized by a rainbow. The first most valuable thing in my life. Mum.
– Light, the artist remembered, wasn’t really drawn on the large. Light came from shades on the page. The light of our lives, she told herself, is formed by the darkness we place around it.
– You ever tried to get some identification without some identification? It’s like trying to go to sleep with your eyes open.
– I’m the girl with too many things to draw and too little ink in my pen.
– I asked him (Picasso in her dreams) a young artist from Brisbane, Australia, might make it all the way to the Mt in New york and he said there’s only one way to make it that far. And then he threw a tub of red paint in my face and said “You must weep”.
– Roll call every morning. Mum asked kids to say their name and then describe the last time they’d done something kind for someone. She says a kid’s less likely to be bad after they’ve reminded the world, and themselves, how good they can be.
– Mum and me. truth be spat like a watermelon seed.
– A dream can reach you like a song on the wind or a jab to the jaw.
– It’s a good idea to assume that one day your life will be the subject of an exhaustive retrospective exhibition because it makes you attempt to live every moment with a sense of its own significance.
– Do I want to walk through this life or mine? Or do I want to cartwheel through it?
There are so many beautiful paintings that come from things like lobve and happiness, but I still reckon the really, really great paintings come from really, really great pain.
– My mum never warns me about boys in cars. My mum only warns me about child protection officers in cars.
– We’re gonna start an art movement ou of Brisbane together. Nouveau Brisbane. New Pineapple. Post banana. We can’t decide.
– Why you? Because you are the one who can take it. Because you’re the one who can use it
– Her desire for the answers she required from her past was greater than the caution she required from her present.
– When you are nobody, you are free to be anybody.No woman realizes the full extent of what she’s capable of until she is forced to realize the full extent of what she is capable of.
– One must care about the world one will never see.
– Are you going to let the world tell you who you are, or are you gonna tell the world who you are?
Book 168
This was a lil more young adult than I wanted it to be, but it was still a good read.
Kate Anderson picks the best cover designs btw. 11/10 for the cover!
– You know how people think of the 1950 as kind of idyllic, even though it really wasn’t if you were anything other than a rich white man?
– But I don’t have that privilege because I fell into the nothing, and I think part of me never left.
– I remember when Davis thought tampons were for nosebleeds.
– I can’t decide which is worse: living in a constant state of mourning or being so empty inside that grief has no place anymore.
– Possessions are always a good place to start. Despite the well-known adage that you can’t take it with you, people tend to be overly attached to their things and all the ghost-hunting websites say that spirits are more likely to stay near their worldly goods.
– Another unarmed Black man killed in the street because an officer in riot gear didn’t recognize his humanity.
– Sometimes it feels like the entire world is bustling around, passing hammers and nails and planks back and forth. They say they are building something together, but I am the only one who can see that it’s a casket.
– “When I died” I said “I felt like I was floating”
– My life ambition is to develop a cookies-and-cream flavored Oreo. Cookies-andcream. That’s what Oreos already are!
– There’s no such a thing as a silly dream.
– I don’t believe in the afterlife, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean I think life is pointless. In fact, I think the complete opposite. I want to give life even more meaning because it’s all there is.
– I finally understand that my fear of the nothing isn’t about what happens after we die. It’s about what happens while we live.
– I’ll never give up another chance to tell the people I love how I feel about them.
āāāā
Book 167
A lil over 4 stars btw…
– Imagine if several times a day, all at once, every single thing around you became impossible to ignore.
– Even when the event was completely out of her control, even when the other party was blatantly overstepping her bounds, she always found a way to blame herself. Always felt this nagging sense of guilt for everything, as if her very existence was a violation of some stone-etched decree.
– I hope his sister ended up getting the help she needed.ā Heather looked at her, puzzled. āSister?ā āYeah, his, uh, older sister?ā Heather shook her head. āThomas was an only child.
– Despite having no evidence of outright malice, she didnāt trust this family, not one bit.
– Eve watched as, one by one, these strangers filed into her home. The distant alarm bells of her subconscious rang out.
āāāā
Book 166
This is not a curriculum book in Italy, so I had never heard of it, and I picked it up just by chance (pls you know how much I LOVE rodents!!!) I am glad I did.
– I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.
– I donāt know whatās worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what youāve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
– Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.
– Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.
– Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.
– A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.
– P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.
āāāāBook 165
– The tree with the deepest roots in this country is a tree of White Supremacy. At the thing is, you don’t have to be the one who planted that tree or even the one who kept it watered or trimmed the branches to be someone who directly benefits from the shade it provides.
– Thereās a whole lot of people who care more about being called a racist than they care about addressing the institution.
– You think I haven’t been tased? I am from God Mississippi! 50,000 volts just gives us a hard on!
– He having tried to put the land in her because he was scared to death the city would wash the mountains clean out of her blood.
– Graffiti, philosophically, is this sort of idea of putting art directly where it isn’t allowed to exist.
– All of the books she;s read, the things she’d studied and learned over the past six years. had been carefully stacked like the making of a campfire, and over the past two months the work became the match.
– What I do know is that there are a whole lot of people, even well-intended people, who are more bothered by the word racist than they are racism.
– The tree with the deepest roots in this country is a tree of White Supremacy. The thing is, you don’t have to be the one who planted that tree or even the one who kept it watered or trimmed the branches to be someone who directly benefits from the shade it provides.
– It’s one thing to kick the hornet’s nest and another altogether to stand there once it’s done.
– How could you soften the swing of a wrecking ball?
– Toya carried that kind of energy all her life. She was a fire, and to be around her was to feel that heat in your bones.
But as soon as Toya could talk, she wanted to be an artist.
Kids attach themselves to all sorts of shiut they don’t fully understand just because it looks cool tough or whatever.
– There was comfortability in the silence.
– It was the ones we thought we knew, those were the ones who broke our hearts.
– I guess it comes a moment you start realizing that keepingyour mouth shut’s the same thing as nodding your head.
– That on- off switch, that ability to walk through the world with blinders was a resource of the privileged.
– I think we’ve got a really bad habit of believing if we don’t talk about it it;s just go away.
– On that night the music finds her and the voices sing her to sleep. This is how the everlasting comes.
āāāāBook 164
āāāāāBook 163
– No matter where you go, there are cracks in the plaster, nails coming loose, you just have to decide where you want to piece yourself back together.
– Silence can hold a thousand stories.
– This place isn’t haunted. Not in the way I’m accustomed to. It’s paralyzed in time.
– Accidents can turn people into gravediggers.
– Two kids and a corgi named Scotch and a wife who baked cookies in the shape of trees and hearts every damn Thursday. Every goddamned Thursday, he told me once.
– She was a coffee shop and gluten-free croissant kinda of woman.
– Curiosity does this: It prods at the gut; it pushes fear aside and cause smart men to do stupid things.
– But there are other times when I want a loud love: screaming, lungs burning, moon-deep kind of love.
– I am stronger than anything he could do to me.
– There is no history in a place until we make it, until you live a life worth remembering.
– If she will look up at the stars and know, we’re all just trying to find our way home.
– A lie is a lie is a lie. It tastes the same when it leaves your throat, regardless of intent.
– Do not judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant
āāāBook 162
– As if death were a resource that had to be earned, that could ever be used up or wasted.
– They could remember the last Super Bowl and World Series and Olympics and the last movie they’d seen or concert they went to, but not when it was decided that there wouldn’t be another.
– The worst storms were the ones that changed you. The ones you remembered not for how bad they objectively were, but for how much damage they did to your own world. Banners, planted in memory.
āāāāāBook 161
– More disturbing than hurt is love when it’s wrong.
– The brain of a psychopath is different from most, I’ve weighed up my chances. Eighty per cent genetics, twenty per cent environment. Me. One hundred per cent fucked.
– Forgiving, that’s what she is, and lonely. A person can forgive a lot if they need the company.
– You broke my heart. You broke my. You broke. You. And me.
– But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. Carson McCullers, 1917ā1967
āāāāBook 160
– Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all.
– This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything ā our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.
– After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred.
– Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive. (this is my evil granmda’s theory!!!!)
– Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear.
– In truth there is no dividing line between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens. The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless.
āāāBook 159
– Everyone on earth knows if you have the respect of a cat it means your soul is worth being around.
– Big Jimās eyeball fell out. Like, fell the fuck out of his head. It rolled onto the grass, and to be honest, Big Jim and I were both taken aback.
– Watching the sunrise…..what an act of beauty, of unwavering faith, something to look forward to each and every day.
– Bald eagles are majestic as fuck.
– Trees are normally very general and all-inclusive with their wisdom pearls. When a tree decides to talk to you.
– And though Nature is tough, she is always conspiring for your success, encouraging you to evolve. You can even hear her if you listen carefully.
– We are more powerful when we work together because we look out for one another by being one. That is the code of murder.
– When you have the power to stand up to oppression, you must.
– Iām not sure why everyone hates opossums so much; they may look like someone shaved the buttocks of a poodle and taught it to talk through itās asshole, but they are generally pretty likable critters.
– The light of heart is free to fly.
āāāāBook 158
– The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.
– There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.
– Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.
– I was never good at being human. That was my problem.
– A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.
āāāāBook 157
– In a world of straight lines, sometimes you have to scribble outside the margins to find the real magic.
– Not all treasure is gold; sometimes itās hidden between dusty pages, waiting for the right eyes to find it.
– The best adventures start with a question no one else has thought to ask.
āāāāBook 156
– Itās like the world decides whoās worth saving and who isnāt. And the rest of us? We get left behind, invisible.
– We bury our secrets so deep, sometimes we forget theyāre even there, but they always find a way to claw their way back to the surface.
– Thereās a fine line between searching for someone and losing yourself in the process.
– When the world doesnāt care, itās easy to start believing you donāt matter. But sometimes the only way to survive is to remind yourself that you do.
– You donāt realize how fragile life is until it starts to crack.
– Silence can be loud. It screams all the things you donāt want to hear.
āāāāBook 155
– Itās strange how the dead can be more present in your life than the living.
– We never notice how fragile life is until it starts to unravel, thread by thread.
– The past isnāt just something you leave behind. It follows you, waiting for the right moment to remind you of everything youāve tried to forget.
– Sometimes the scariest monsters arenāt the ones from fairy tales, but the people we think we know.
āāāāāBook 154
– Maybe people are the cages, locks keeping us in place. And weāre only as free as we think we are.
– No one believes a liar. Even when theyāre telling the truth.
– When youāre a little black girl, everybody assumes you know how to take care of yourself. Because the world has made you grow up too fast.
– People only see what they want to see. It makes the ugly easier to deal with.
– I didnāt realize how broken I was until someone tried to put me together again.
āāāāBook 153
– I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.
– Logic is the key to understanding the universe, but it doesnāt always unlock the secrets of the heart.
– Understanding the world means recognizing its patterns, but emotions donāt always follow a logical sequence.
– Sometimes I think that the hardest part of life is finding a way to bridge the gap between what you know and how you feel.
– We all wear masks, even if we donāt realize it, and sometimes we forget which one is the real us.
– The truth is a complex thing, layered in perceptions and experiences that can twist its shape.
āāāāBook 152
– Courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.
– Sometimes, you must fight for the things you want, even if it means battling your own demons.
– In the darkest of times, we discover the light within ourselves.
āāāāāBook 151
– True knowledge is not found in books or scrolls, but in the depths of experience and the courage to face the unknown.
– The greatest mysteries are not hidden from us; they reside within us, waiting for the moment we are ready to perceive them.
– You cannot possess the light without knowing the darkness, for it is in the shadow that we see the true outline of who we are.
– The universe whispers to those who listen, revealing that what we call ārealityā is merely the veil over infinite possibilities.
– Every question leads to a deeper question, and every answer is but a door to greater understanding, or greater confusion.
– The soulās journey is not measured by distance, but by the depth of insight gained through trials, errors, and revelations.
āāāāBook 150
– Love is the thread that connects us to others, weaving a tapestry of memories and moments that define our existence.
– In the face of death, we come to understand what truly matters, and itās often the simplest things that hold the greatest significance.
– The world is full of things we cannot control, but we can always choose how we respond to them.
– When we lose something dear, we donāt just grieve its absence; we also mourn the moments we will never have again.
– Sometimes, the most profound connections are made in silence, in the quiet presence of those we love.
āāāBook 149
-Sometimes, one moment changes everything.
-Thereās a difference between whatās legal and whatās right. Sometimes the law has nothing to do with justice.
– The hardest part of forgiveness is recognizing that it doesnāt absolve the other person; it liberates you
āāāāBook 148
– The ghosts of our past shape our present, reminding us of the sacrifices made for the dreams we now chase.
– Love can be both a refuge and a risk, binding us to others while also exposing us to vulnerability.
– Sometimes, itās the unlikeliest friendships that provide the most profound understanding of who we are.
– Hope is a fragile thing, yet it can bloom in the darkest of places, pushing through the cracks of despair.
– In a world that seeks to define us, we must boldly declare who we are and what we stand for.
āāāāBook 147
– The essence of humanity lies not in what we possess, but in our ability to love, to dream, and to reach out to one another
– Freedom is not merely the absence of walls; it is the ability to explore the depths of oneās own soul and the world beyond.
– Every encounter has the power to transform us, yet it is the connections that we choose to nurture that define our existence.
– We are all stories in progress, marked by our struggles and victories, waiting to be told and heard.
āāāāBook 146
– We stand against the small, the weak, the unhappy, and the unfinished.
– The things you own end up owning you.
– The mind is a terrible thing to waste. We waste it by filling it with the distractions of a shallow culture.
– What is the point of this life if we donāt question what weāre told?
– The fire was bright and the flames danced, but all I saw was the ashes of ideas lost forever.
– We stand against the burning of ideas, the silencing of voices, and the oppression of thought.
– Itās not the books that are important; itās the conversations that arise from them.
– The real danger lies not in the flames but in the minds that refuse to think.
– The act of reading is an act of rebellion, a declaration of independence from the norm.
āāāBook 145
– There is strength in vulnerability; sometimes it takes courage to show our true selves.
– The act of creating something beautiful is a reflection of our desire to leave a mark on the world.
– Sometimes, it is the connections we make in the quiet moments that leave the deepest impressions.
– The process of arranging flowers mirrors the journey of life; it requires patience, creativity, and a willingness to embrace change.
āāāāāBook 144
– Hope is a fragile thing, easily shattered, yet itās often the only light guiding us through darkness.
– In a world that seeks to define us by our borders, we must remember that humanity knows no boundaries.
– The stories we carry shape us; they are both a burden and a source of strength.
– The beauty of the world can coexist with its brutality; it is in this duality that we find our resilience.
– Every step forward can feel like a betrayal of the life left behind, yet it is necessary for survival.
– Each new day is a chance to reclaim our narrative, to rewrite our stories in a world that tries to silence us.
– Empathy is a bridge that connects us, allowing us to see the humanity in othersā struggles.
āāāāBook 143
– Sometimes the lies we tell ourselves are the only things that keep us going.
– In the shadows of our past, we often find the roots of our present struggles.
– Forgiveness is not just a gift we give to others; it is a gift we give ourselves.
– The heart knows things the mind cannot comprehend, and it often leads us down paths we never expected.
– We hide our scars, believing they make us weak, yet they tell the story of our survival.
– The most profound connections often stem from shared pain and understanding.
– In the end, it is our truths, however messy and complicated, that define who we are.
āāāāBook 142
– What we see and what we choose to ignore are often two sides of the same coin.
-To confront the past is to engage in an act of courage; it is where true healing begins.
– In a world divided by difference, it is our shared humanity that must unite us.
– Justice is not a destination; it is a journey marked by struggle and resilience.
– The roots of our actions dig deep into the soil of our upbringing, shaping who we become.
– Sometimes, the most profound truths lie hidden in the quiet spaces between words.
āāāāBook 141
– Sometimes, the darkness is where we find our true selves, hidden beneath layers of fear and pain.
– Memories can be as treacherous as they are comforting, often distorting our perception of reality.
– We create stories to make sense of our lives, but sometimes those stories can trap us in their own web.
– Love can be a double-edged sword, offering both protection and the potential for deep wounds.
– In the shadows of our memories, we often uncover truths we are not ready to face.
– Survival is not just about enduring; itās about confronting the demons that threaten to consume us.
āāāBook 140
– I am not my circumstances. I am my choices.
– The worst part of being lied to is knowing you werenāt worth the truth.
– It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
āāāāBook 139
– Sometimes the most powerful voice is the one thatās been silenced.
– Every story has the potential to change the world; we just have to be brave enough to tell it.
– The world may try to box you in, but your spirit is boundless.
– The struggle for justice is not always loud; sometimes itās a whisper that grows into a roar.
– To be seen is to be understood; to be understood is to be loved.
– Every choice we make ripples through time, affecting not just our lives but those of others.
āāāāBook 138
– Awakening isnāt just about the light of day; itās about finding the light within ourselves.
– Even in the darkest times, the dawn has a way of reminding us that new beginnings are always possible.
– Sometimes we need to lose ourselves to find who we truly are.
– In the stillness of a moment, we can discover the loudest truths.
āāāāBook 137
– I am not a person, I am a story.
– Time is a thief, but the memories it leaves are treasures.
– The best stories are the ones that linger, like a whispered promise in the dark.
– There is power in the names we choose to keep or to cast away.
– To be alive is to be in a constant state of becoming.
āāāāBook 135
– The measure of a life is found in the laughter shared and the love given.
– Sometimes, it takes a single question to unravel everything we thought we knew.
– Sometimes, the most profound truths lie in the silence between words.
– We all carry our own weights, and sometimes, sharing that burden is the greatest gift.
āāāāāBook 134
– In the depths of the ocean, I learned that silence can be just as powerful as words.
– Sometimes, it takes a little distance to see the beauty in our lives.
– In the shadow of grief, we often find the brightest sparks of life.
– Weāre all a little like the tidesāpulled by forces we canāt always see.
– Lifeās most vibrant colors often emerge from the depths of our struggles.
– Even in solitude, thereās a symphony of voices waiting to be heard.
āāBook 133
āāāāāBook 132
– Living with myself is like sharing a house with a strangerāsometimes we get along, and sometimes we just donāt.
– Vulnerability is not a weakness; itās a bridge that connects us to one another.
– Each scar tells a story, a reminder of battles fought and lessons learned.”
– The journey of self-acceptance is messy, filled with setbacks, but every stumble is a step toward understanding.
– In a world that often feels disconnected, finding common ground with myself is the first step to connecting with others.
Book 131
– Life is a series of unexpected plot twists; the best stories come from embracing the chaos.
– In a world obsessed with perfection, sometimes the quirks are what make us truly shine.
– Being true to yourself is like wearing a neon outfit in a sea of grayādaring, bold, and absolutely unforgettable.
– Friendship is the ultimate form of self-care, a reminder that we donāt have to navigate life alone.
āāāāBook 130
– Silence is a friend, but sometimes itās a friend that needs to be challenged.
– Finding your voice is like learning to swim; it may feel daunting at first, but once you dive in, you discover the freedom of floating.
– To speak is to reclaim power, and in reclaiming power, we create a ripple effect of change.
– Words are like paint; the way you use them can create a masterpiece or a mess.
– Sometimes I wonder if silence is just my brain’s way of organizing chaos.
– Iāve learned that being invisible can be a superpowerābut only if you choose to step into the light when it matters.
āāāBook 129
– In the heart of chaos, thereās a rhythm only the brave can dance to.
– Sometimes, a single moment can stretch into infinity, filled with what-ifs and could-have-beens.
– Memories are like wildflowers; they can bloom unexpectedly in the cracks of your heart.
– Trust is like a delicate bird; once it takes flight, itās hard to coax it back into the hand that held it.
– Courage isnāt always loud; sometimes, itās the quiet determination to keep moving forward when everything feels still.
āāBook 128
– Freedom isnāt just a place; itās a state of mind, cultivated through the seeds of self-acceptance.
– In the mosaic of life, every pieceāboth beautiful and brokenācontributes to the whole.
– Connection is not always found in words; sometimes, itās in the silence shared between souls.
– To embrace vulnerability is to embrace the power of authenticity, where real transformation begins.
āāāBook 127
– Listening to our inner whispers can be the key to unlocking the doors of our true potential.
– Sometimes, the greatest battles are fought in the quiet corners of our minds.
– In the cacophony of life, the most profound truths often emerge from the softest murmurs within.
– Sometimes, the smallest voice carries the weight of the world, echoing the dreams we dare not speak aloud.
āāāBook 126
– Sometimes, in the absence of answers, the mind creates monsters of its own.
– In the stillness of the desert, the noise inside becomes unbearable.
– Itās amazing how close you can come to enlightenment while trying not to melt into a puddle of sweat.
– Sometimes, you just need to sit with a cactus and feel like you understand each other.
– I came here to get away from everything, but I forgot my brain came with me.
– The more I think about it, the more the tumbleweed feels like a metaphor for my lifeājust rolling along with no particular destination.
āāāāBook 125
– Silence is the most dangerous kind of weapon, because it leaves space for fear to grow.
– We are all haunted by the stories we donāt tell.
– In a world full of menās power, women have to learn how to be their own warriors.
– The weight of unanswered questions can be heavier than the truth itself.
āāāāBook 124
– I was stuck somewhere between who I was and who I wanted to be.
– Friendship is a little like teaāit takes time to brew, and sometimes itās bitter before itās sweet.
– I wasnāt sure what home was anymoreāif it was a place or a feeling, or if maybe it was something I would never truly find.
– I realized that maybe itās okay to not always be okay. To just exist in the space between happy and sad.
– Being different isnāt the same as being broken, but sometimes it feels that way.
āāāāāBook 123
– The other America is here, where the social contract feels broken, and the promise of equality is no more than a distant echo.
– There are no children here. Theyāve seen too much to ever be kids again.
– The walls of the projects donāt just enclose people; they trap dreams, compressing them until thereās nothing left but survival.
– In a world where violence is routine, innocence is a luxury too costly to keep.
– The dreams of these children are like wildflowers, growing in the cracks of concrete, fragile and easily crushed by the weight of the world around them.
āāāāāBook 132
– I am unhideable, unashamed, and unafraid to take up space.
– I am not just a girl; I am a storm of stories, a whirlwind of dreams, and a tapestry of cultures.
– I learn that my voice can be both weapon and shield, a way to protect myself and to fight back.
– In a world that often tries to shrink me, I will grow into my own strength.
– I am learning to be the author of my own narrative, not just a character in someone elseās story.
āāāāBook 131
– To manifest your dreams, you must first believe in their possibility.
– Just as a Jedi tunes into the Force, we must learn to tune into our own inner guidance.
– Every thought is a seed; plant wisely and nurture the ones that align with your true self.
– The universe responds to your energy, so ensure your vibrations are those of hope, love, and possibility.
– Obstacles are merely opportunities in disguise, testing our commitment to our goals.
– The path of attraction is about balanceābetween desire and gratitude, action and reflection.
Book 130
– I learned early that love can be twisted into something that feels like control.
– Survival isnāt just about physical safety; itās about claiming your own identity in a world that seeks to erase it.
– I had to learn that my worth wasnāt defined by the beliefs of others, but by my own choices.
Book 129
– Love and pain often go hand in hand, teaching us lessons we didnāt know we needed.
– Sometimes it feels like the world is a broken mirror, reflecting shards of our lives in ways we canāt understand.
– We often find ourselves in the stories we didnāt choose, learning to navigate a path that isnāt ours.
– The world can feel overwhelmingly large, but itās the small connections that ground us in our humanity.
Book 128
– Home is not just a place; itās a feeling of safety wrapped in the warmth of love and understanding.
– Every brushstroke of color in our lives contributes to the masterpiece of who we are.
– Adventure is not always about grand journeys; sometimes, itās the quiet exploration of our own hearts.
– We often carry the weight of othersā expectations, forgetting to nurture our own dreams.
– Life is a delicate dance between holding on and letting go.
Book 127
– The pressure to be perfect can suffocate you, especially when perfection is a moving target.
– Grief is a complicated beast; it doesnāt come with a manual on how to navigate its waves.
– We often hide our true selves behind a mask of what we think others want us to be.
– Understanding our heritage means embracing both the struggles and the beauty that come with it.
– Sometimes, love feels more like a prison than a sanctuary, with the walls built from expectations.
– We are often told to be grateful for what we have, but itās okay to want more, to seek out our own happiness.
Book 126
– The journey of life is often about reclaiming the parts of ourselves that have been taken away.
– Cultural dislocation can be disorienting, but it can also lead to profound self-discovery.
– In the eyes of others, we may become symbols of their fears or fantasies, but we are always more than that.
– Tattoos can tell stories that words cannot; they are a form of communication that transcends the barriers of language.
– Every act of courage begins with the decision to confront our fears, to embrace the unknown.
Book 125
– In a world full of noise, itās often the quietest voices that carry the heaviest truths.
– Fear thrives in the shadows, but courage is born when we choose to step into the light.
– Every story has layers, and peeling them back can reveal the most unexpected connections.
– Every person has a story, often hidden beneath layers of fear and misunderstanding.
– In the face of darkness, itās the flicker of hope that guides us toward the light.
Book 124
– The beauty of humanity lies in our ability to adapt, to find a way even when the odds are stacked against us.
– The journey of healing is not linear; it winds and turns, often leading us back to where we started.
– Forgiveness is a powerful tool, freeing us from the shackles of anger and resentment.
– Nature has a way of healing wounds we didnāt even know we carried.
– Creativity can flourish in chaos, giving birth to beauty in the midst of destruction.
– Tradition can be both a comfort and a cage, providing stability while stifling individuality.
– Identity is a mosaic, pieced together from our experiences, choices, and the people we love.
Book 123
– The world is better than you think. Itās just that our minds are not always up to date.
– Fear is often a poor guide to what is happening in the world; facts help us see the reality.
– Humanitarian progress is not a given; it requires awareness, education, and action.
– We often underestimate the ability of human ingenuity to solve problems when we look at the world through a pessimistic lens.
– Global trends show that education is a key factor in lifting communities out of poverty.
Book 122
– The allure of power can corrupt even the noblest intentions, leading to consequences we never foresaw.
– Every civilization has faced the temptation to prioritize short-term gains over long-term sustainability.
– Humans have an extraordinary ability to rationalize their mistakes, often rewriting history to fit a more comfortable narrative.
– Innovation without ethics can lead to unintended consequences that echo through generations.
Book 121
– The boundaries we create for ourselves can sometimes be the very things that keep us from truly connecting with others.
– Life is a series of awkward moments, and itās in those moments that we often find our truest selves.
– Our expectations can shape our reality, but they can also blind us to the beauty of the unexpected.
– In the midst of chaos, we often find the clarity we didnāt know we were seeking.
Book 120
Book 119
Book 118
– Nostalgia has a way of shaping our identities, weaving the past into the fabric of our present.
– Friendship can transcend dimensions, proving that connection matters more than proximity.
– The pursuit of knowledge is a quest in itself, leading us to discover not just facts but the essence of who we are.
– The thrill of competition ignites a fire within, pushing us to test our limits and redefine our potential.
– Technology can be a double-edged sword, offering incredible possibilities while also posing significant ethical dilemmas.
Book 117
Ok, first of all, finding Bill and Luke Walton in this book wasn’t on my Bingo card! š But let’s continue…
– Artistry in food is not just about presentation; itās about the love and skill infused into every bite.
– In a world of fast food, sushi reminds us of the beauty of patience and the art of preparation.
– Sourcing the best ingredients is essential; sustainability plays a crucial role in preserving our oceans and culinary future.
– Understanding sushi involves delving into its rich history, revealing how food can bridge cultures and generations.
– The delicate balance of flavors in sushi mirrors the harmony found in nature itself.
Book 116
– Breathing is the most fundamental act of life, yet it is often overlooked as a tool for health and well-being.
– Ancient practices hold wisdom that modern science is only beginning to unravel, showing us the power of conscious breath.
– The simple act of breathing deeply can ground us and restore our sense of balance.
– The connection between breath and emotion is profound, revealing how our bodies respond to the world around us.
– Exploring the science of breath is a journey into self-discovery, illuminating pathways to better health and clarity.
Book 115
– Growing up in a world where my very existence was illegal taught me resilience and the power of humor.
– Identity is complex; I learned that being mixed race in a divided society meant navigating a landscape of contradictions.
– In a society built on oppression, we found joy in the small moments, proving that laughter can thrive even in darkness.
– Education was my escape route; it opened doors to possibilities beyond the limitations of my circumstances.
– Understanding my past is essential for shaping my future; itās a reminder of where I come from and the power of change.
Book 114
– Fuck Trump (this is mine…:
– Wealth can shield us from consequences, but it cannot buy the love and validation we truly crave.
– A lack of accountability within a family can foster an environment where harmful behaviors go unchecked.
– The pursuit of success can morph into a destructive obsession, driving individuals to disregard their relationships and humanity.
– When love is conditional, it creates a chasm between family members, leading to isolation rather than connection.
– To understand the actions of those in power, we must examine the influence of their upbringing and the lessons learned at home.
Book 113
– Understanding the nature of suffering is the first step toward healing; it teaches us that pain is a universal part of the human experience.
– Compassion for ourselves is the foundation for extending compassion to others; it transforms our relationships and our world.
– Letting go is not about losing; itās about freeing ourselves from attachments that weigh us down.
– The practice of gratitude shifts our focus from what we lack to the abundance that surrounds us, fostering a sense of peace.
– Every emotion we experience holds a lesson; embracing them without resistance opens pathways to deeper understanding.
– We should view our thoughts as passing clouds, we are not defined by them.
Book 112
– The key to building lasting habits is to make them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
– Our identity shapes our habits; when we change the way we see ourselves, we create a framework for lasting change.
– Environment plays a crucial role in shaping our behaviors; optimizing our surroundings can lead to better choices.
– Breaking a bad habit is not about willpower; it’s about understanding the cues and cravings that drive our actions.
– Reflection and review are essential for growth; they allow us to learn from our experiences and adjust our strategies.
– We often underestimate the significance of our daily choices; each decision is a vote for the person we wish to become.
Book 111
– Your thoughts are not facts; learning to differentiate between them is the first step toward liberation.
– Comfort is the enemy of progress; stepping outside your comfort zone is where true growth happens.
– Accountability is a form of freedom; when you take ownership of your choices, you regain control of your life.
– Fear is a natural part of the human experience, but it should never dictate your actions or hold you back.
– Stop waiting for the right moment; there will never be a perfect time to start living your life fully.
– To change your life, you must first change your mindset; itās not about what happens to you but how you respond.
– Authenticity is powerful; embracing who you truly are is the key to building meaningful connections.
Book 110
Book 109
– Power is intoxicating; Caponeās rise to prominence illustrates how ambition can blur the lines between success and criminality.
– The media played a crucial role in shaping Caponeās public persona, transforming him from a mere criminal into a larger-than-life figure.
– Behind the bravado, there lay a complex man, driven by a desire for acceptance and loyalty within his tumultuous world.
– The downfall of Capone serves as a cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked power and the fragility of fame.
– Al Capone was not just a criminal; he was a product of his environment, illustrating how society can create monsters.
– Capone’s philanthropic efforts show that even those with a notorious reputation can seek redemption through acts of kindness.
– The Roaring Twenties were a playground for the ambitious, and Capone capitalized on the chaos, thriving where others faltered.
Book 108
– Family can be both a source of love and a breeding ground for darkness; the bonds we share can complicate our identities.
– Emotional trauma can twist our perceptions, making it difficult to discern truth from the lies we tell ourselves.
– Isolation can amplify our demons; itās in solitude that we confront the parts of ourselves we wish to forget.
– The search for understanding often leads us down dark paths, revealing the hidden horrors of those we think we know.
– Secrets can bind us together, but they can also unravel the very fabric of our relationships, creating distance where there should be intimacy.
Book 107
– The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of oneās negative experience is itself a positive experience.
– Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest.
– The key to a good life is not giving a fck about more; itās giving a fck about less, giving a f*ck about only what is true and immediate and important.
Book 106
– You are responsible for what you say and do. You are not responsible for whether or not people freak out about it.
– You are perfect. To think anything less is as pointless as a river thinking that it’s got too many curves or that it moves too slowly or that its rapids are too rapid.
– When you love yourself enough to stand in your truth no matter what the cost, everyone benefits.
– We tiptoe through life hoping to safely make it to death.
– You are loved. Massively. Ferociously. Unconditionally. The Universe is totally freaking out about how awesome you are.
Book 105
– Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.
– Hygge is about giving your responsible, stressed-out, American self a break. Relax. Just for a little while.
– Hygge is about giving your responsible, stressed-out, American self a break. Relax. Just for a little while.
– We feel most at home, most ourselves, in an intimate, low-key setting where we do not have to put on a show and can just enjoy the simple pleasures of life.
Book 104
Honestlty, I didn’t take any notes…I hated this cringy book.
Book 103
– It is one thing to be mad, and quite another to be affected by madness.
– She wasnāt sure who she was anymore. What she had become. She knew only that she wasnāt Alice.
– There is a place for fear. Fear helps us to make choices. Fear keeps us alive. But too much fear will kill you, because it destroys your soul.
– Monsters die out when you stop believing in them.
– You would run so far away, Alice, that no one would ever find you again. Not even yourself.
Book 102
– He was both the hunter and the hunted, driven by an insatiable desire to possess what could never be his.
– In a world obsessed with appearances, he sought the one thing that lay beneath the surface, the invisible thread that binds us all together.
– The search for perfection can lead to madness, for in the pursuit of an unattainable ideal, we often lose ourselves.
– Isolation can breed both genius and monstrosity, revealing the thin line between creation and destruction.
– What is it to be human if not to feel deeply, to love fiercely, and to ache for connection?
Book 101
– She cannot chain my soul. Yes, she will buy my body. But not my heart. She cannot own my heart.
– I talk to my own heart when I am troubled. I give myself advice.
– We all have scars. From loving people too deeply. From wanting to protect them. From being hurt. The scars are a reminder of the lessons we’ve learned.
– I will not run, I will not give up. I will make myself strong.
– People act when they feel hurt or powerful. Rarely do they act when they feel nothing at all.
– I may be small, but I have a voice, and I will use it.
Book 100
– No one warned her that being able to read meant you could understand all the awful things people said.
– She knew how to keep quiet, knew how to lie low, knew how to talk her way out of anything.
– Sometimes you have to go beyond yourself to find yourself.
– The ground, like the sky, was full of abysses.
– She knew she carried more than she wanted to admit.
Book 99
– We remember the past, live in the present, and write the future.
– Life is a choice. You can choose to be a victim or anything else you like to be.
– The universe may forget us, but it doesnāt matter. Because we are the ants, and we’ll keep marching on.
– Itās not that weāve given up. Itās that weāve accepted that everythingās already lost.
Book 98
I laughed…and I cried.
A lot.
One of my favourite books.
– Itās not the letting go that hurts, itās the holding on.
– Lily and I are forever connected by a thin, invisible string. No matter how far apart we are, neither one of us will ever tug without the other one feeling it.
– Memory is fragile. We are the sum of what we remember. And even that is in constant flux.
– We donāt always get to choose what we hold on to.
– I find it easier to speak to her in fragments, in broken sentences, because if I give words full measure, Iām afraid theyāll explode.
Book 97
– Thereās magic in the mundane, if you know how to look for it.
– There are stories in everything, even in the silence that hangs between us.
– Sometimes, to find ourselves, we must first lose everything we thought we knew.
– We are all the architects of our own destruction, building worlds of our own making, even as they crumble around us.
– We create our own mythologies, weaving together threads of truth and fiction until the two are indistinguishable.
Book 96
– I have lost control over everything, even the idea of control.
– You donāt know whatās going on in someone elseās life, and you donāt know what theyāre capable of.
– The world is full of people who will pretend to love you until they get what they want.
– The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Book 95
– We are all connected to a vast sea of energy, where the smallest particles of existence communicate and influence one another, defying the limitations of time and space.
– Consciousness is not confined to the brain. Rather, it exists in a Fieldāa matrix of interconnected energies that link all beings and matter across the universe.
– We are not separate beings, but rather threads in the grand tapestry of a unified energy field.
– In The Field, science becomes poetry. It reveals a universe that is alive, interconnected, and brimming with unseen possibilities for human potential.
Book 94
– You are already Buddha; you just need to realize it.
– Every breath is a reminder to return to the present.
– Happiness is not something to be sought; it is found in the stillness of our being.
– The world is a mirror reflecting your thoughts; change your thoughts, and the world changes.
– Simplicity opens the door to profound wisdom.
Book 93
Book 92
I read this because of Erika..he was so important to her. A cute friendship. We miss you Erika.
– Music is not just sound; it’s a lifeline, a way to make sense of chaos.
– Thereās a magic in the air when you lose yourself in a song, a connection that transcends the moment.
– Being vulnerable is the first step to finding your voice.
– Every stranger holds a piece of the puzzle; sometimes, you just need to listen.
Book 91
Although I am pretty sure this book killed a few of my brain cells, it was pretty entertaining.
I wonder which Pedro I would be…hhmm…
– In the world of art, there are no mistakes, only opportunities.
– Sometimes the most delicious things come from a little chaos.
Book 90
– The line between charisma and manipulation can be razor-thin.
– He preyed on the vulnerabilities of others, promising them love and acceptance.
– Understanding Manson means confronting the darker aspects of human nature.
– The legacy of his actions continues to haunt America, a cautionary tale of delusion and devotion.
– He created a cult of personality, where loyalty was rewarded with a twisted sense of belonging. (MAGA??!!)
– Every individual in his orbit was both a victim and a participant in his nightmarish vision.
Book 89
– The world is filled with people who are unaware of the beauty of their own lives.
– Grief is a strange thing; itās a love that has nowhere to go.
– I watched my family and friends as they tried to piece together the fragments of their lives without me.
– The only way to be truly free is to let go of what you cannot control.
– Love can transcend even the boundaries of life and death.
Book 88
– What we perceive as reality is influenced by our thoughts and intentions.
– Quantum mechanics suggests that all things are interconnected, blurring the lines between mind and matter.
– The exploration of psychic phenomena invites us to rethink the relationship between the observer and the observed.
– Consciousness is not merely a byproduct of the brain; it is a fundamental aspect of the universe.
Book 87
Book 86
Book 85
– Every choice we make creates a ripple, shaping the lives around us in ways we may never know.
– Finding your place often requires you to take a leap of faith, even if it means stumbling along the way.
– Sometimes, you have to let go of who you were to become who you are meant to be.
Book 84
– The universe is always speaking to us, but we have to be willing to listen.
– The most important part of life is what you choose to do with your time.
– Sometimes, you have to break the rules to find out what you’re truly capable of.
– Being ordinary is not a curse; it can be a powerful strength.
– Love is not just a feeling; itās an action, a choice we make every day.
Book 83
– I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonaldās would still be open.
– I wonder if I’ll ever have to decide which is worse, life as weāre living or no life at all.
– I always felt even if the world came to an end, I would still be me. But I’m not.
– Itās hard to keep hoping when all you can see is how far there is left to go.
– When thereās nothing but survival, you realize how little you need to be happy.
– Thereās not a lot of room for self-pity when youāre hungry.
Book 82
– Henriettaās cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it, and theyāre still living.
– But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family canāt afford to see no doctors?
– Itās not just about science. Itās about ethics. About what happens when doctors fail to communicate, or patients donāt understand.
– When you know and understand yourself completely, you have dominion over yourself. Thatās power.
– No one told her that her cells would grow with mythological intensity, or that they would become some of the most important cells in medical research.
– This was a woman who died in pain, whose cells were taken without permission, yet her legacy lives on in ways she never could have imagined.
– Sheās the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty.
– It was a debt that could never be paid, not in dollars, not in scientific progress, because what they took from Henrietta was not theirs to take.
– We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish.
Book 81
– I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I didnāt expect it to happen quite so literally.. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.
– Reality always seemed tentative to me, only a step away from dissolving into chaos and illusion. I didnāt expect it to happen quite so literally.
– Weāre all just puppets, dancing to the strings of fate, and the only thing we have control over is how we respond to the inevitable.
– The world you live in is not the only one. There are other worlds all around you, and they are all just as real as the one you think you know.
– I think, therefore I am. But what if I think, therefore I am not?
– The universe is a big place, and it doesn’t care about you. Your reality is just a tiny bubble floating in it.
– Time is a trickster. It deceives us, plays with our minds, and leaves us grasping at shadows.
Book 80
– The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
– I go to seek a Great Perhaps. I am in search of the next great adventure, the next meaningful experience.
– We are all just stories in the end, and the best we can do is make our stories worth telling.
– You cannot just be happy; you have to create your own happiness, carve it out of the chaos of life.
– You know, youāre not going to be happy all the time. You just have to find the moments that make it worthwhile.
Book 79
– Iām not sure what Iām looking for, but I know Iām not going to find it here.
– Iām just a girl caught in the middle of a war, and the enemy is me.
– Addiction is a monster with many faces, and Iām not sure I can defeat it.
– I thought I was a dreamer, but I was just a delusional girl trying to stay awake.
– The drug is a lie, a beautiful lie that feels more real than reality.
– I was a puppet, and my strings were made of crystal.
– Itās easier to fall than to rise, to surrender than to fight.
Book 78
– You donāt know what youāre missing until youāve seen it through someone elseās eyes.
– Itās hard to be human when you donāt even know what that means.
– Every choice leads to a different story, and Iām still trying to figure out which one is mine.
– Iāve learned that sometimes the things we want the most are the things that can destroy us.
– Itās easy to pretend to be someone else; itās much harder to be yourself.
– I can feel the weight of my own skin, the way it wraps around me like a promise I canāt keep.
– Thereās beauty in the grotesque, a strange kind of perfection in the things that scare us.
– I thought I knew what it meant to be lost, but I didnāt realize how deep that feeling could go.
– Love is not always a choice; sometimes, itās something that happens in the dark
Book 77
– Every champion starts as a beginner, and the journey is what makes us strong.
– Friendship can bloom in the unlikeliest of places, especially when there are dragons to slay.
– Failure isnāt the end; itās just another way to learn how to succeed.
– The world might see us as underdogs, but underestimation is our greatest weapon.
Book 76
– We didnāt just fight the undead; we fought our own fear and panic.
– The past is a weapon; if we forget it, we become vulnerable to repeating our mistakes.
– It was not the end of the world; it was just a wake-up call.
– Sometimes, the most dangerous enemy is the one that looks like us.
– We learned that survival is about more than just fighting; itās about community, resilience, and the will to endure.
– Fear is a virus of its own; it spreads faster than any infection.
Book 75
– Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.
– Iāve always believed that if youāre not doing something you love, youāre wasting your time.
– Good food is the foundation of genuine happiness.
– In the restaurant world, there are no secrets, only stories that haven’t been told.
Book 74
– Their lives were a chaotic dance on the edge of oblivion, a relentless pursuit of freedom in a world that sought to contain them.
– In the end, it wasnāt the law that brought them down; it was their own reckless ambition.
– They lived like stars, burning brightly but fleetingly, leaving behind a legacy that would haunt the American psyche.
– They werenāt just criminals; they were symbols of rebellion against a society that had failed them.
– Caught in the crossfire of fame and infamy, they became legends, but the truth of their lives was far more tragic.
– Their love story was written in blood, a testament to the passion that drove them and the violence that consumed them.
– They sought adventure in a world of monotony, but in their pursuit of freedom, they found only destruction.
Book 73
– What was it like to have everyone look at you, and feel like you were special?
– You have to be brave enough to be weak.
– The world is a mirror, reflecting our deepest fears and our wildest dreams.
– In a society obsessed with perfection, true beauty lies in our imperfections.
– We are all works in progress, constantly evolving and redefining what it means to be us.
Book 72
I wanted to be beautiful, but I also wanted to be me.
Book 71
– You donāt have to look a certain way to be a certain way.
– Real beauty is about being genuine.
Book 70
– Itās not just about surviving. Itās about living.
– Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.
– You know, when I was in the arena, I thought I had to fight for my life. But it was all about fighting for the lives of others.
– Weāre all just pieces of a bigger game.
– Youāre not just fighting for yourself; youāre fighting for everyone who canāt.
Book 69
– The odds are never in our favor.
– The idea is to be a little less surprised every time something awful happens.
– You could put a knife in my back and I wouldnāt care. Just donāt put a knife in my heart.
– Itās like a game. Weāre all just pieces on the board.
Book 68
– Sometimes, the dead arenāt as dead as you think.
– I may be stuck in limbo, but that doesnāt mean Iām going to give up.
Book 67
-Destroying things is much easier than making them.
– I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.
– Stupid people are dangerous.
– For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.
– You canāt be neutral on a moving train.
– You canāt ever put the past behind you. You can only make it part of who you are.
– The only thing worse than a broken heart is knowing youāre about to have one.
Book 66
– You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they’ve been read…
– We are more than the sum of our parts; we are the stories that we tell.
– We are all capable of violence, and we all have the capacity for healing.
– To be human is to be incomplete.
– Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth.
– There really is no place like home, even when it’s grown a couple of sizes too small.
– I am worn, down to the raw nub of my soul.
Now is the time, o bitter beer, soothe my spirit;
smooth mouth of whisky, tell me lies of truth;
but better still, sweet wine, be harbinger of deep and dreamless sleep.
Book 65
– Even at that age I had stumbled upon one truth, and that is, the best way to get misinformed is to ask a lot of questions.
– The books so fired me with the desire for travel, adventure, romance, that I was miserable most of the time.
– This gambling habit is the curse of a thiefās life.
– I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted.
Book 64
– There are choices you have to make not just once, but every time they come up.
– They say of the poet and the madman we all have a little.
– When you win, we win; but when you go down, you go down alone.
– You have a worth outside of a job, outside the “jacket” imposed on you since birth.
– It is the violent peotry of the times written in the blood of the youth
Book 63
– Your desire to make art — beautiful or meaningful or emotive art — is integral to your sense of who you are.
– To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have.
– The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.
– Learn to work on your work.
Book 62
Book 61
– Going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution.
– I didn’t feel like there was anything incompatible with my love of gangster rap and my spiritual aspirations.
– The more I practiced kindness and humility, the more the world seemed to appear friendly and manageable.
– The more my mind began to quiet, the more I found myself wanting to be surrounded by natural beauty.
– The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one’s own mind and heart.
Book 60
– You wonāt understand life and death until youāre ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.
– As for enlightenment, that’s just for people who can’t face reality.
– You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.
– Those who hope for purity and righteousness always try and destroy that which disturbs them. They think the disturbance comes from outside themselves. This is a serious problem. Wars, suicide bombings, and all sorts of other nasty things start from the premise that we can destroy “evil” outside ourselves without dealing with the evil within.
Book 59
– My great treasure is that I am my own master, that I am not dependent upon anyone, and that I am not afraid of misfortunes.
– I am writing My Life so that I may laugh at myself, and I am succeeding.
– There is no such thing as a perfectly happy or perfectly unhappy man in the world. One has more happiness in his life and another more unhappiness, and the same circumstance may produce widely different effects on individuals of different temperaments.
– As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore, I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.
– The sweetest pleasures are those which are hardest to be won.
– Rhetoric makes use of natureās secrets in the same way as painters who try to imitate it: their most beautiful work is false.
Book 58
Book 57
– The most important things in life happen when youāre just hanging out.
– I just didnāt want to spend the bulk of my waking hours on this planet yawning and sighing and waiting for five oāclock, all for the little bits of green paper that eventually blew out of my life.
Book 56
Book 55
Book 54
– Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.
– Once upon a time,” he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.
– The world is dark, and light is precious.
Come closer, dear reader.
You must trust me.
I am telling you a story.
– Love, as we have already discussed, is a powerful, wonderful, ridiculous thing, capable of moving mountains. And spools of thread.
– Despereaux marveled at his own bravery.
He admired his own defiance.
And then, reader, he fainted.
Book 53
One of my favourites…
– See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.
– When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
– I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.
– I don’t even want you to nod, that’s how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.
– Did you win your sword fight?”
“Of course I won the fucking sword fight,” Hiro says. “I’m the greatest sword fighter in the world.”
“And you wrote the software.”
“Yeah. That, too,” Hiro says.ā
– This Snow Crash thing–is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?
Juanita shrugs. What’s the difference?
– Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn’t get any work done.
Book 52
– They havenāt thought it through properly. Thatās what makes them so dangerous. Theyāre competent, but theyāre stupid.
– āYouāre pretty quick for an old guy,ā he said. āThatās how I got to be an old guy,ā McGrath said back.ā
Book 51
Great Book, great movie. Perfection.
– I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse. (of course I have got to start with this one…)
– Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.
– A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.
– The lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun.
– Great men are not born great, they grow great.
– Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that’s why they have godfathers.
– Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.
– He smelled the garden, the yellow shield of light smote his eyes, and he whispered, “Life is so beautiful.” Yes, he thought, if I can die saying, “Life is so beautiful,” then nothing else is important.
– Behind every successful fortune there is a crime.
– Time erodes gratitude more quickly than it does beauty.
Book 50
– Human Nature Baby, grab it and growl.
– Children have to grow into their imaginations like a pair of oversized shoes.
– We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.
– Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?
– Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.
– She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.
– The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.
– This inhuman place makes human monsters.
– Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.
– Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in.
Book 49
– You’re dead, George. You just don’t have the sense to lie down.
– Cut him. Cut him while I stand here and watch. I want to see the blood flow. Don’t make me tell you twice.
– The George George Stark George Starked over the Starky Stark.
– I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.
– Then hear this, and never forget it. Any fool with fast hands can take a tiger by the balls, but it takes a hero to keep on squeezing.
Book 48
– First you spend a lot of time and money making the grass grow, just so you can spend a lot of time and money cutting it down again a little while later.
– People live, and then they die. And as long as they do both things properly, there’s nothing much to regret
– Ask once, ask twice if you must, but for God’s sake don’t ask three times.
– Difference between the men and the boys is the price of their toys?
Book 47
– This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.
– At the temple there is a poem called “Loss” carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
– He was like a song I’d heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
– I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
– We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.
– Of course, a sign doesn’t mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.
Book 46
– Never believe a writer. Listen to them, by all means, but never believe them.
– While the road of good intentions might end in hell, the people who tried to fill the potholes along the way deserved at least some credit.
– Factual mistakes usually result from a failure to ask the right question and not from erroneous information.
– It was as black as an elephantās asshole in here.
– the real opposite of fear might be honesty.
Book 45
– The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
– You are a wonderful creature. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
– One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details.
– There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating ā people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
– Never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.
Book 44
– Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.
– Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn’t it?
– But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.
– Rules? PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES!
– They can’t tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.
– Good writin’ ain’t necessarily good readin’.
Book 43
– Get busy living or get busy dying.
– Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.
– I have to remind myself that some birds arenāt meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
– Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.
– And I guess you judge how well you’re doing by how well you sleep at night… and what your dreams are like.
– No one dies happy, you can only die well.
– One does not always need to hear a slam to know that the door has been closed.
– I donāt have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.
– The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. Itās hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.
Book 42
– Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon.
– From outside came a sudden and loud music of birds celebrating their existence.
– He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly.
– Fathers die, mothers die, uncles die even if they went to Yale and look as solid as bank walls in their three-piece Savile Row suits. Kids die too, maybe.
Book 41
– How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
– I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
– It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
– No one has ever become poor by giving.
– Because paper has more patience than people.
– Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.
– People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion.
– I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death!
– I think a lot, but I don’t say much.
– Memories mean more to me than dresses.
Book 40
– I’d never believed in luck. Never had any cause to. Never relied on it, because I never could.
– I had to decide how to use that pressure. I had to decide whether it was going to crush me or turn me into a diamond.
– Waiting is a skill like anything else.
– If you can see a bandwagon, itās too late to get on.
Book 39
– The idea seemed to be that if you prayed extremely hard–especially if a lot of people prayed at once–maybe God would change things. The trouble was, what if your enemy was praying, too? Which prayer would God listen to?
– All these words, written so long ago, seemed to say to her, Remember us. We were here. We were real.
– āHow can you stand to do it? The poor little mouse!” Grover shrugged. “It’s nature,” he said. “Nature likes the snake just as much as the mouse.ā
Book 38
– Who’s sick? If I want to die, I’ll just die; it’s too tiresome to be sick.
Book 37
– Cleaning is considered a vital part of the training process in all traditional Japanese disciplines and is a required practice for any novice. It is accorded spiritual significance. Purifying an unclean place is believed to purify the mind.
– A star geiko is never, ever alone and I always wanted to be by myself.
– They begged me not to quit. But they didnāt offer to change anything.
– How come we kept celebrating things that made me feel bad?
Book 36
– This world is better than Utopia because – and follow this point carefully – you can never live in Utopia. Utopia is always somewhere else. That’s the very definition of Utopia.
– Reality’s all you’ve got. But here’s the real secret, the real miracle: it’s enough.
– Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what we’re living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.
– You can master tantric yogic poly-orgasmic Wonder Sex but you’re still gonna die alone.
– Do as well as you possibly can. That’s Buddhist morality.
– It’s not “you” and “the universe.” It’s “universeyou”.
– Nothing can be separated from everything else.
Book 35
– What was money when oneās life was at stake? We had learned that nothing lasts and that no value is absolute. The only exception to that rule: freedom.
– If all men are good, there can be no Auschwitz.
– There are things which must cause one to lose oneās reason, or one has none to lose.
– The uncompromising pride of the Third Reich had been broken by the world-wide collaboration of people not avid of conquest, but of freedom.
– Those who seek to protect the body at all cost die many times over.
Book 34
– Itās hard to think about nothing. Iāve tried it. You end up thinking about everything and getting stressed out. Itās best to just think of one thing. A good thing.
– The now-ness of things.
– ‘I’m loud sometimes,’ she said, thinking So bloody what if I’m quiet – what’s the thing about it?
– The future has already happened, just like the past. And one day you will see that there are no answers, only the places we make.
Book 33
– If you aren’t cute, you may as well be clever.
– Like all of my friends, she’s a lousy judge of character. (lol!!)
-When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it’, and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.
– I hate you’ she said to me one afternoon. ‘I really, really hate you.’ Call me sensitive, but I couldn’t help but take it personally.
– At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.
Book 32
My favourite Trilogy <3
– Madness, and then illumination.
– The future is a hundred thousand threads, but the past is a fabric that can never be rewoven.
– The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.
– If you asked me to marry you all over again today I'd say yes, said Valentine. And if I had only met you for the first time today, I'd ask.
– The only teacher that's worth anything to you is your enemy.
– āI'm not a liar, sir,' she said. "'No, I'm sure you sincerely become whatever it is you're pretending to be.ā
Book 31
– PerchĆ© vede: morire bene ĆØ meglio che vivere male. Vivere male ĆØ il sacrificio piĆ¹ duro di tutti.
– TornerĆ² ed ĆØ meglio cosƬ: quella bambina mi fa paura. Sai la stessa paura che si prova all’inizio di un amore, quando l’intuito ci annuncia le sofferenze che esso ci costerĆ , e la prudenza ci induce a girarvi intorno senza accostarcisi troppo, ma ĆØ un girarvi a spirale, piĆ¹ vicino sempre piĆ¹ vicino, e sai bene che finirai per cadervi dentro: a pagare ogni istante di gioia con mille dolori.
Book 30
– We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.
– College is the best thing that can ever happen to you,” my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking.
– If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that you might go from day to day without finding shit in your hair.
– Right, I breast feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it. Just tell me where you live, Pinocchio, and save the baloney for lunch.
– The beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent.
– The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.
Book 29
– The main thing to do is pay attention. Pay close attention to everything, notice what no one else notices. Then you’ll know what no one else knows, and that’s always useful.
– There is so much darkness in Ember, Lina. It’s not just outside, it’s inside us, too.
– The trouble with anger is, it gets hold of you. And then you aren’t the master of yourself anymore. Anger is.
– Wouldn’t it be strange, she thought, to have a blue sky? But she liked the way it looked. It would be beautiful – a blue sky.
– The day had a strange but comforting feel to it, like a rest between the end of one time and the beginning of another.
Book 28
One of my favourite trilogies…
– No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.
– He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.
– āYou killed more people than anybody in history.” “Be the best at whatever you do, that’s what my mother always told me.ā
– Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.
– I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.
– āWe’ve devoted our lives to learning about them!” Miro said. Ender stopped. “Not from them.ā
Book 27
I love this book so much!
-Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
– I don’t care if I pass your test, I don’t care if I follow your rules. If you can cheat, so can I. I won’t let you beat me unfairly – I’ll beat you unfairly first.
– I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
– Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all alongāthe same person that I am today.
– Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.
– There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world
– So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.
– You’re a monster.
Thanks. Does this mean I get a raise?
No, just a medal. The budget isn’t inexhaustible.
– I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it’s due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don’t have to do it often.
Book 26
– Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
– Full to the brim with hope and love and joy, she watched the little light bulb shining like a promise in the night.
– āThis is such an amazing world,” he said finally, putting the glass and magnet into his pocket. “I love it here, except for the troubles with people.ā
– She looked powerful, Lina thought, even though she was very short.
Book 25
– It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?
– The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.
– What words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?
– If everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!
Book 23
– I wouldn’t care about hurting myself or anybody else. Because I know now that doing things doesn’t hurt you; you get hurt by avoiding them
– Everything is muffled and car-crash-like and I want to speak but she’s looking through me and I’m looking through alcohol. We’re nowhere near each other even as we stumble in tandem through our disintegrating lives.
– By blaming ourselves we take away the right of others to do the same.
Book 22
my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.
Book 21
– History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?
– Faith ā acceptance of which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.
– The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God.
– By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.
– When a question has no correct answer, there is only one honest response. The gray area between yes and no. Silence
– Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.
– Can you keep secrets? Can you know a thing and never say it again?
– āToday is today. But there are many tomorrows.
– My lawyers will fricassee your testicles for breakfast. And if you dare board my plane without a warrant, your spleen will follow.
Book 20
– Charlie Asher: I accidently shagged a monk last night. Minty Fresh: Sometimes, in times of crisis, that shit cannot be avoided.
– Everyone is happier if they have someone else to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both.
– You seem upset, Charlie. Is something wrong? Charlie: No, no, Iām okay, I just had to take directions from a mute beaver in a fez to get here, itās unsettling.
– Most of us don’t live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we’re a whole bunch of selves.
– āSo I am Death” Charlie said then turned to his daughter while buttering his toast. “This is death toast sweety.ā
– She set the course of his life with just a smile.
Book 19
– Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
– You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
– People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
– With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.
– Itās never an insult to be called what somebody thinks is a bad name. It just shows you how poor that person is, it doesnāt hurt you.
– Things are always better in the morning.
– We’re paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It’s that simple.
Book 18
– Happiness is only real when shared.
– Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.
– When you forgive, you love. And when you love, Godās light shines upon you.
– We like companionship, see, but we can’t stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.
– What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?
Book 17
This book is funny as hell…
– Nobody’s perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him…
– Blessed are the dumbfucks.
– āJosh: “What is this thing?” Gasper: “It’s a Yeti. An abominable snowman.” Biff: “This is what happens when you fuck a sheep?” Josh: “Not an abomination, abominable.ā
– It’s very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in orange robes start giggling. Buddhism.
– It’s hard for me, a Jew, to stay in the moment. Without the past, where is the guilt? And without the future, where is the dread? And without guilt and dread, who am I?
– This story is not and never was meant to challenge anyone’s faith; however, if one’s faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do.
– Routine feeds the illusion of safety.
– Faith isn’t an act of intelligence, it’s an act of imagination.
– Blessed are the meek, for to them we shall say, ‘attaboy’.
Book 16
Book 15
Book 14
Book 13
Book 12
Book 11
Book 10
Book 09
Book 08
Book 7
Book 6
Book 5
Book 4