Quote of the Week - September 13
"War strands men in the past. This is one of the ways war echoes from generation to generation. Our cities and villages have not forgotten their missing citizens. Our land is full of skeletons. We are a country with a phantom limb. You boys feel it too, even if you do not recognize it yet. We all do."
The Sunflower Boys
Sam Wachman
Quote of the Week - September 6
"The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes,
but being slowed down it cannot abide."
Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell
Quote of the Week - August 27
"Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Quote of the Week - August 16
"With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him. He turned and walked slowly back to the farm."
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
Quote of the Week - August 9
"Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for! Perhaps he boarded a trolley, traveled out to the home which he had seen for years in his mind, and only in his mind, and pressed the bell, just as he has longed to do in thousands of dreams, only to find that the person who should open the door was not there, and would never be there again.”
Man's Search For Meaning
Viktor Frankl
Quote of the Week - August 1
"We spent our lives trying to keep our true names inside and hidden, because if they were let out we would be known and named.”
Apex Hides the Hurt
Colston Whitehead
Quote of the Week - July 18
“After all, I absorb the world around me, and that’s changing all the time. Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too.”
Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata
Quote of the Week - July 6
"Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind."
House of Leaves
Mark Danielewski
Quote of the Week - June 23
"Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong–that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right."
Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
Quote of the Week - June 15
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
Quote of the Week - June7
“Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?”
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Quote of the Week - May 26
"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest frief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die...before we can appreciate the enjoyments of life."
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Quote of the Week - May 18
"Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow, the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been [his mother's] fault for having allowed him to believe such cruel ideals."
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Quote of the Week - May 4
"I learned that I needed to love my mother and father in all their flawed, outrageous humanity. And in families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness."
The Prince of Tides
Pat Conroy
Quote of the Week - Apr 27
"I don’t trust society to protect us, I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they managed to con a block of people to vote for them."
The Godfather
Mario Puzo
Quote of the Week - Apr 20
"She has other memories too that she has no right to have.
She remembers, for instance (though she hadn't been there), what the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man did to Estha in Abhilash Talkies. She remembers the taste of the tomato sandwiches–Estha's sandwiches, that Estha ate–on the Madras Mail to Madras.
And these are only the small things."
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Quote of the Week - Apr 13
"Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract."
Atonement
Ian McEwan
Quote of the Week - Apr 6
"Acapulco always had a heart for extravagance, so when at last she made her fall from grace, she did so with all the spectacular pageantry the world had come to expect of her. The cartels painted the town red."
American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins
Quote of the Week - Mar 30
"[He] had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márques
Quote of the Week - Mar 23
"Tears bursting from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions."
Roots
Alex Haley
Quote of the Week - Mar 16
"Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it."
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Quote of the Week - Mar 9
"I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange."
Tea at the Palace of Hoon
Wallace Stevens
Quote of the Week - Mar 2
"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping
you to achieve it."
The Alchemist
Paolo Coelho
Quote of the Week - Feb 23
"Few doctors will admit this...but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound."
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
Quote of the Week - Feb 16
"What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses."
The Cider House Rules
John Irving
Quote of the Week - Feb 9
"[Their] house often teemed with young people clamouring for advice, shyly soliciting compliments that would probably mean too much to them, and sharing stories from that poignant phase of life that combined crippling under-confidence with wildly unjustified arrogance within the same five minutes."
Should We Stay or Should We Go
Lionel Shriver
