Are you familiar with the sacred practice of florilegia? I wasn’t, until I started listening to the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast (yes, I’m extremely late to that particular party. The podcast started in 2015 and I just started listening to it last year; I’m currently in the middle of the fifth book, in May 2019. The pandemic hasn’t happened yet). In florilegia, readers choose bits of a text that “sparkle” at them – “sparklets” – and put them in conversation with each other to gain a deeper meaning. The way Casper and Vanessa do it, each chooses one sentence or fragment, and they read them together, first in one order, then in the other. I’ve always thought of these quotes I pulled out as separate from each other, but reading them in pairs does prove interesting. The quotes below are from books I read between late May through early July of this year. They come from picture books, graphic novels, fiction and nonfiction.

1. “It gets a bit tirin’, tryin’ to prove yourself to others. Some people are just never gonna see you the way you want to be seen, y’know? I reckon it’s best to please yourself first, and the ones who love you will get it.” (A Song for You and I by K. O’Neill)
2. I don’t know what it is / that makes people want / to destroy things / they don’t understand. (Neshama by Marcella Pixley)
3. The logical extension of objectification is dehumanization. (Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert)
4. “Our whole lives are this weird performance for the approval of strangers.” (So Over Sharing by Elissa Brent Weissman)
5. …every wish seemed to carve out a bigger hole in him, where more wanting could go. (Return to Sender by Vera Brosgol)
6. For our heroine, friendship and found family signify safety, and safety is better than glory. (The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger)
7. And for the rest of the night, it was as if she held a sugar cube in her mouth, a slow, constant melt of sweetness. (Ravishing the Heiress by Sherry Thomas)
8. It’s amazing how many possibilities there are in a single day. (Time Loops and Meet Cutes by Jackie Lau)
9. Humanity finds a way. Sometimes it finds that way over and over and over again. (Brief Histories of Everyday Objects by Andy Warner)
10. Maybe the things a person noticed were a big part of who a person was. (Ella Josephine, Resident in Charge by Nina LaCour)

And a bonus from Vera Brosgol: “Our smallest actions ripple through the world without us ever knowing the full consequences.”

See previous Quotes from Books blog posts here.