It’s been…oh dear…about three years since I posted in the “quotes from books” series, though this one (and the one following) has been sitting in my drafts folder for about that long. After a weekend of intense focus on writing, I’m looking back at these and noticing how the quotes I choose fall into three categories: something funny or clever, poetic language, or something to do with theme.

1. “The more questions she asked, the more questions she thought up.” (A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers)
2. “If this were a novel, he might simply be a poorly written character. But there are no poorly written people. Only ones you don’t yet understand.” (The Verifiers, Jane Pek)
3. “Grief is a language they don’t have to speak. It communicates just fine on its own.” (A Year to the Day, Robin Benway)
4. “And it didn’t stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.” (The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett)
5. “Who is the world designed for?” (What Can A Body Do?, Sara Hendren)
6. “The secret to getting people to like you / is to like yourself.” (In the Beautiful Country, Jane Kuo)
7. “She understood what she was supposed to think and believe, but that wasn’t the same thing as thinking and believing those things.” (A Song Called Home, Sara Zarr)
8. “A mother’s heroic journey is not about how she leaves, but about how she stays.” (I’ll Show Myself Out, Jessi Klein)
9. “True learning comes from being open to wrong answers.” (The End of the Wild, Nicole Helget)
10. “…her memories were all pictures without sound.” (This Time Tomorrow, Emma Straub)

I’ve been listening to old (but new-to-me) episodes of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text lately, on a friend’s recommendation. Of all the “sacred practices” I’ve heard Vanessa and Casper use so far – lectio divina, sacred imagination, havruta, florilegia, and pardes – I’m partial to lectio divina and havruta, but when they introduced florilegia – “essentially a quote journal” – well, that’s something I’ve been doing most of my life.

A hundred years ago, I used to participate in Top Ten Tuesdays, and then I started doing the occasional batch of Top Ten quotes from books I’d read. The last one of these was December 2017. For every book I read, I write a review in LibraryThing, and often include quotes. Since 2017 was five (5) years ago, there’s a bit of a backlog…but here’s a new batch of ten, from books read July 27-August 27:

1. “You’re never going to make everyone happy….It’s more important to stand up for what you believe in.” (The Secret Battle of Evan Pao, Wendy Wan-Long Shang)
2. “Think about what you want. Don’t just react.”(The Peach Rebellion, Wendelin Van Draanen)
3. “I think sometimes comedians are able to tell the truth about things other people won’t talk about.” (The New One, Mike Birbiglia)
4. “…if you’re fluent in a language, there’s a place you belong.” (My Broken Language, Quiara Alegría Hudes)
5. “The richness of our lives depends on what we are willing to notice and what we are willing to believe.” (Mr. and Mrs. Bunny–Detectives Extraordinaire, Polly Horvath)
6. “The problem is that these squirrels are definitely cats.” [Paraphrased] (Mina, Matthew Forsythe)
7. “The past pulled us and the future pushed us.” (Sigh, Gone, Phuc Tran)
8. “The things we do to avoid difficult things are often worse than the difficult thing.” (Just Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane)
9. “Did I have it in me to confront the past without getting stuck in it?” (Cult Classic, Sloane Crosley)
10. “Maybe that is what drives us to make art out of the worst things that happen to us. Maybe for some of us, that is how we survive.” (Mother Noise, Cindy House)

Continuing the “quotes from books” series, this batch of quotes is from books I read between May 2017 and August 2017. The tenth quote here sums up the year pretty nicely.

1.  “My mother always said that kindness was love in disguise.” –Dodger, Terry Pratchett
2.  “Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.” -from the preface of The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu
3.  “I am not one thing. I am everyone and everything that has touched me. This is the basic principle of forensic science: every contact leaves a trace.” (accompanied by an illustration) –You Are Here, Jenny Lawson
4.  “It’s not moving on…it’s moving differently.” –Holding Up the Universe, Jennifer Niven
5.  From “A Short History of Silence” in The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit: (a) “If the right to speak, if having credibility, if being heard is a kind of wealth, that wealth is now being redistributed”; (b) “Silence protects violence.”
6.  From Elizabeth Wein’s author’s note at the end of The Pearl Thief: “This is what authors do: we make up stuff that might be true.”
7.  Quoted in Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places: “We do not remember days, we remember moments.” (Cesare Pavese)
8.  “It is hard to see who a person is, through all of those memories of who they were.” –When the English Fall, David Williams
9.  “How terribly hard it is to accept that other people feel what we feel.” –Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, Ada Calhoun
10.  “There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books.” –Among Others, Jo Walton

See previous installments in this series here:

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII

After a long hiatus (in my drafts folder), we return to the “quotes from books” series. This batch includes quotes from books I read between August 2016 and April 2017.

1.  Shrill by Lindy West was so excellent I have three quotes from it: (a) “I was working at a cashier at an “upscale general store and gift shop” (or, as it was known around my house, the Bourgeois Splendor Ceramic Bird Emporium & Money Fire)…”; (b) “Shame is a tool of oppression, not change….You know what’s shameful? A complete lack of empathy”; (c) “Just because you haven’t personally experienced something doesn’t make it not true.”
   
2.  I re-read a longtime favorite, Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven, which is full of beautiful language, and this line is as true as ever: “It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.”
   
3.  From David Levithan’s story “Your Temporary Santa” in My True Love Gave to Me, : “And in that moment, in that momentary loss of logic to wonder…”
4.  From Leigh Bardugo’s “Head, Scales, Tongue, Tail” in Summer Days and Summer Nights: “Some of us wear our hearts. Some of us carry them.”
5.  “None are so blind as those who will not see.” –The Wonder, Emma Donoghue
6.  “If underneath anger was fear, then underneath fear was love. Everything came down to the terror of losing what you love.” –Today Will Be Different, Maria Semple
7.  “The past was never perfect, and we never reach the future.” –Moranifesto, Caitlin Moran
8.  “If there’s a word for something, we’re much more likely to ‘see’ it and treat it as real.” –Waking Up White, Debby Irving
9.  “I tell her: Maybe if you take off all that armor, you won’t feel so heavy.” –Still Life With Tornado, A.S. King
10.  “There is one kind of thought that’s always useful and always gracious. That kind of thought is, “What can I do for someone else?”” –Gracious, Kelly Williams Brown

See previous installments in this series here:

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI

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)

Here’s another installment of Quotes from Books I’ve Read Recently (see the first set of quotes here). When I started this series (if two posts thus far can be called a series), I figured most if not all of the quotes I’d select would be from adult literary fiction, but in fact there are several from nonfiction and plenty from YA and children’s as well.

1. If you see hooded figures in the Dog Park, no you didn’t. –Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
2. …but they wanted someone to blame more than they wanted someone to explain. –Uprooted, Naomi Novik
3. If you think of doing something in New York City, you can be certain that at least two thousand other people have that same thought. And of the two thousand who do, about one thousand will be standing in line waiting to do it. –From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg
4. …the experience of reading is…our best vehicle to a transformed mind, and, literally and figuratively, to a changed brain….Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading. –Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf
   
5. What no one sees is the personal and cultural influences that have brought them to their opinions. –Our Babies, Ourselves, Meredith F. Small
6. I believed in her like some people believe in Heaven. –Seraphina, Rachel Hartman
7. [My dad] taught [us] some Beatles songs and told us that whenever we saw [reporters] with cameras, we should just sing those songs. At the time, I thought it was just fun to sing really loud, but then I realized what an evil genius my dad is. To broadcast Beatles lyrics, you have to have the rights to the songs… –Emmy & Oliver, Robin Benway
   
8. After enough time it fades and you’re grateful. –In the Unlikely Event, Judy Blume
9. “You have to believe it to see it.” –Circus Mirandus, Cassie Beasley
10. “There are no limits to the ways people you think you know can astonish you.” –Bitterblue, Kristin Cashore