This batch of quotes is from books I read between April and August 2016. The tenth quote was hard to choose because nearly every sentence in The Gap of Time was so knockout beautiful.

1.  “Mostly I’m just trying to get it right, whatever that means.” –The Truth About Forever, Sarah Dessen
2.  But, of course, the hardest shells hid the most fragile selves. –The Expatriates, Janice Y.K. Lee
3.  He made a whole city full of windows. -Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson
4.  “You can’t compare one person’s coping capacity to another, hon.” –The Raven King, Maggie Stiefvater
5.  He considered how memories hold our lives in place but weigh nothing and cannot be seen or touched. –Father’s Day, Simon Van Booy
6.  “And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” –The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, Neil Gaiman
7.  There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace. –The Last Painting of Sara De Vos, Dominic Smith
8.  Unlike the world of technology, where rapid innovation produces improvements, innovation in fashion just produces arbitrary stylistic changes. –Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth Cline
9.  It’s impossible, what I’m trying to do. To say good-bye without telling them I’m leaving. –Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett
10.  Forgiveness is a word like tiger – there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is. –The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson

Continuing my series of quotes from books I’ve read semi-recently (this batch is November 2015-April 2016), originally inspired by The Broke and the Bookish and Three Good Rats. Here are quotes from three YA novels, three nonfiction books, one etiquette book, one book of essays, and two adult novels.

1.  “When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies.” 
   1. b. “Oh, the world is full of things you don’t see.” –The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
2.  “Peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet.” –Small Victories, Anne Lamott
3.  “It is surely a premise of democracy that the rules apply equally to everyone.” –Common Courtesy, Judith Martin
4.  “The big problem doesn’t lie in differences between what men and women want out of life and love. The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were constructed on the assumption that male breadwinner families would always be the norm.” –Marriage, a History, Stephanie Coontz
5. “When you don’t know what made someone leave once, you also don’t know what might make him do it again.” –Conviction, Kelly Loy Gilbert
6.   “The biggest difference between boys and girls is how people treat them.” –None of the Above, I.W. Gregorio
7.  “What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.” –This Must Be the Place, Maggie O’Farrell
8.  “God is a human invention.” –Gretel and the Dark, Eliza Granville
9.  “We can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point….We might call this the “rubber band theory” of personality….We are elastic and can stretch ourselves, but only so much.” –Quiet, Susan Cain
10.  “The first rule of a successful getaway is not to look as if you’re trying to get away.” –A Burglar’s Guide to the City, Geoff Manaugh

Previously:

Part I (August-November 2015)

Part II (June-September 2015)

Part III (January-June 2015)

Part IV (some all-time favorites, no particular order)

After more than a year, I’m picking this up again (see Part III here, with links to Parts I & II). The quotes below are some of my longtime favorites.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are. –Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver

She’ll be okay without me, I think as I watch her, but I know that she will not. –The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

“I love my children. No one will tell you otherwise, but just between the two of us I have to say I admire you for not having any. The ways they break your heart, Jesus, and it never stops. I mean it, it simply does not stop.” –The Magician’s Assistant, Ann Patchett

People had their natural habitats, after all, demarcated not in ecologies but in ages. He’d been perfectly adapted to being nineteen, and she was better at being thirty-two. –Gold, Chris Cleave

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books – but they were, of course, really doors….A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination….They are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead. -“Alma Mater,” Caitlin Moran (anthologized in The Library Book)