As any fan of reading can attest, sometimes there is a sentence in a book that brings you up short that sends shivers crackling along your spine, rushing to the tips of your fingers, so beautiful that you want to close your eyes and meditate on its perfection. Reading it over and over again gives you a feeling of warm familiarity, like seeing home again after a long time away. When I find a quote I love, I write it on a notecard and put it on the wall, so that when my eyes wander while I work, at least they wander to beauty.
1. "Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night." (Jumpa Lahiri, “The Lowlands”)
2. "I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany. But with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night." (Khaled Hosseini, “The Kite Runner”)
3. "But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect." (Zadie Smith, “White Teeth”)
4. "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." (Nicole Krauss, “The History of Love”)
5. "Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are." (Marcus Zusak, “I Am the Messenger”)
6. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom." (William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116”)
7. "In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”)
8. "We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke and the presumption that once our eyes watered." (Tom Stoppard, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”)
9. "He stepped down, trying not to look at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking." (Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”)
10. "She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony, holding the universe together." (J.D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”)
11. "They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs and loving each other." (“Michael Chabon,The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay”)
12. "It had been so beautiful. Life had been so simple and so terribly beautiful." (Naseem Rakha, “The Crying Tree”)
13. "No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself." (Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One's Own”)
14. "Each time you happen to me all over again." (Edith Wharton, “The Age of Innocence”)
15. "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." (John Steinbeck, “East of Eden”)
16. “His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” (James Joyce, “The Dead”)
17. "We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows - a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.” (Dave Eggers, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”)
18. "Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know." (Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”)
19. "Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly...The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars." (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”)
20. "There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We're only just beginning, she thought, to understand." (Virginia Woolf, “The Years”)
