October 18, 2012
"Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened."
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

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(Notes: 4)
  
October 12, 2012
"A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how."
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards

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(Notes: 9)
  
September 20, 2012
"The government to you is what God is to agnostics—only to be invoked when your own well being is at stake."
Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh

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September 20, 2012
"It was never the right time or it was always the right time, depending on how you looked at it."
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

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September 20, 2012
"There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it."
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett

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September 20, 2012
"I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it."
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

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(Notes: 13)
  
September 19, 2012
"The island had come to seem one of those places seen from the train that belong to a life in which we shall never take part."
Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome

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(Notes: 2)
  
September 19, 2012
"How do you fight an enemy who fights with neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?"
The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh

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(Notes: 9)
  
September 19, 2012
"I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken."
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

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(Notes: 11)
  
August 20, 2012
"It is…difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows."
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

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(Notes: 4)
  
August 20, 2012
"Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there’. I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful."
Looking for Alaska, John Green

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(Notes: 9)
  
August 20, 2012
"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

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(Notes: 12)
  
August 20, 2012
"First the colors.
Then the humans.
That’s usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try."
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

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(Notes: 35)
  
August 20, 2012
"For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

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(Notes: 2)
  
August 19, 2012
"You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question."
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

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(Notes: 5)