As an avid consumer of books, I am always captivated by the way an author can string a line of words together, perpetually break your heart, and make you ponder life or move you to tears. The windows to new worlds and other lives, books nurture the mind, the heart and the soul. If you don't love to read you should start to and if you've forgotten why you used to love to read, this is for you. Here are 15 of my favorite quotes from my favorite books to make you remember why reading and writing are art forms:
1. “[Tom Weylin] wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.”
–Octavia Butler, "Kindred"
2. “I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.”
–Lauren DeStefano, "Wither"
3. “By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”
-Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"
4. “There is not love of life without despair about life.”
-Albert Camus, "The Stranger"
5. “It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps of the porch. My heart spasmed among the peonies like a trout.”
–E. Lockhart, "We Were Liars"
6. “He stared at her, knowing with certainty that he was falling in love. He pulled her close and kissed her beneath a blanket of stars, wondering how on earth he'd been lucky enough to find her.”
–Nicholas Sparks, "The Last Song"
7. “She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”
–Isabel Allende, "The House of the Spirits"
8. “Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”
-Sherman Alexie, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian"
9. “So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was substance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.”
–Jodi Picoult, "Nineteen Minutes"
10. “Time is priceless, but it’s Free. You can't own it, you can use it. You can spend it. But you can't keep it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.”
–Audrey Niffenegger, "The Time Traveler’s Wife"
11. “We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
–Margaret Atwood, "The Handmaid’s Tale"
12. “It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye.”
–Kristin Cashore, "Fire"
13. “We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates’ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects. These may be messages from God or tricks of the eye, but in neither case are we permitted to ignore them.”
–Anna Godbersen, "The Luxe"
14. “It sounded weird to hear you talk so much; normally you only said a few words at a time. I'd never imagined that you'd have a story, too. Until that moment, you were just the kidnapper. You didn't have reasons for anything. You were stupid and evil and mentally ill. That was all. When you started talking, you started changing.”
–Lucy Christopher, "Stolen: A Letter to My Captor"
15. “If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
– J.K. Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"
