“It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.”
NEIL GAIMAN, CORALINE
“What’s the point of being a hero when everyone thinks you’re a villain?”
ELLEN HOPKINS, SMOKE
“Silence fell between us. This was a common occurrence whenever we’re alone. When you’re comfortable with someone, you don’t need to always fill the void with noise. I liked it when we would just be.”
ELIZABETH EULBERG, BETTER OFF FRIENDS
“I remember…watching that separation of sea and sky…and for the first time I realize that none of us are seeing the same thing. That all our horizons end in different places.”
HUNTLEY FITZPATRICK, WHAT I THOUGHT WAS TRUE
“What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, ‘They lived happily ever after,’ and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.”
SCOTT WESTERFELD, AFTERWORLDS
“I stopped allowing myself to dream, because it was more painful to long for things and never get them than to deal with whatever was in front of me.”
VERONICA ROTH, FOUR: A DIVERGENT STORY COLLECTION
“I promise to never love anyone with all my heart again, because the pain that comes with a broken heart is nothing compared to the pain of a shattered one.”
JAYME ARDENTE-SILLIMAN, WRITTEN IN THE STARS
“If you hear a song that makes you cry and you don’t want to cry anymore, you don’t listen to that song anymore. But you can’t get away from yourself. You can’t decide not to see yourself anymore. You can’t decide to turn off the noise in your head.”
JAY ASHER, THIRTEEN REASONS WHY
I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx
“Some things don’t ever get settled. You just make a place for them. Learn to let them sit there with you, side by side with the good.”
CAROL WILEY CASSELLA, OXYGEN
“People only disappear when they have somewhere to go.”
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFRóN, MARINA
“Sometimes the most ordinary things are the ones we learn to miss the most.”
JENNIFER CHIAVERINI, THE QUILTER’S APPRENTICE
“The rest of us become narrow and mean when we live falsely. I’m sick to death of living falsely. I’ve been doing it for years.”
SARAH WATERS, THE PAYING GUESTS
“It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.”
PETER HELLER, THE PAINTER
“You are reading while walking, she reads. You can’t see your feet. The spread pages glide over the sidewalk, mottled by leaf shadows, by moonlight and streetlight. Over continents of shadow, continents of light. The book is a bird with white wings. You are a bird. Reading, you can fly. You are flying now.”
JOYELLE MCSWEENEY, MY MOTHER SHE KILLED ME, MY FATHER HE ATE ME: FORTY NEW FAIRY TALES
“You cannot say ‘no’ to the people you love, not often. That’s the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a 'yes’. Or you have to make them say 'no.’ You have to take time and trouble.”
MARIO PUZO, THE GODFATHER
“A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.”
DANIEL WALLACE, THE KINGS AND QUEENS OF ROAM