The Age of Miracles

"It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There's a certain boldness to inaction." 

The Age of Miracles, p. 83
By Karen Thompson Walker
Published 2012

 

Looking for Alaska

"I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe 'the afterlife' is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled."

Looking for Alaska, pp. 219-20

By John Green

Published 2005

Sisterland

"On average, an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater happens somewhere in the world every three days. Mostly, they happen underwater, and we hardly take notice. It is only when the earthquake comes to us, upending the streets and houses and trees we think of as ours, that they command our attention. But the earth...is always busy."

Sisterland, pp. 389-90
By Curtis Sittenfeld

Published 2013

Gone Girl

"The truth is malleable; you just need to pick the right expert."   

Gone Girl, p. 190

By Gillian Flynn
Published 2012

Girl, Interrupted

"It was my misfortune - or salvation - to be at all times perfectly conscious of my misperceptions of reality... This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled."

Girl, Interrupted, p. 41-42

By Susanna Kaysen

Published 1993

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

"I was a child of atheists, but I had an intuition of God. The days seemed created for our worship. There was grass and flowers and clouds. And then there were the words for these things: mare's tails and a mackerel sky, daylillies and lady's slippers and lilicas and hyacinth. There were words even for the weeds: goldenrod and ragweed and Queen Anne's lace. You could feed yourself on the grandeur of the sounds."

The Long Goodbye: A Memoir, p. 2

By Meghan O'Rourke 

Published 2012

The Abstinence Teacher

"I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them." 

The Abstinence Teacher, p. 264
By Tom Perrotta
Published 2007

How to Buy a Love of Reading

 "'He's self-invented. Thinks he's self-contained. Drinks to ignore his seepage. I feel truly sorry for him. He's very young to be so lonely.' 

'Lonely? You know nothing. He's—' 

'People who make fiction of themselves can't be otherwise.'" 

How to Buy a Love of Reading, p. 124 

By Tanya Egan Gibson

Published 2006

The Fault in Our Stars

"I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed."

The Fault in Our Stars, p. 223
By John Green
Published 2012

The Marriage Plot

Source: LPH

"In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable."

The Marriage Plot, p. 77
By Jeffery Eugenides
Published 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad

"I was working for the city as a janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summer, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all."

A Visit from the Goon Squad, p. 71
By Jennifer Egan
Published 2010

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

"She called Joseph the desert, one summer afternoon when we were all walking along the Santa Monica Pier, because, she explained, he was an ecosystem that simply needed less input."

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, p. 52
By Aimee Bender
Published 2010

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

"'When one is young, one thinks of love as the most important thing,' Professor Shan said, still facing the window. 'It's natural if you think so, though I do hope you've learned a few things from the books I've read to you. One could waste one's life pursuing a flower in the mirror, a moon in the river, but that is not what I want to see happen to you.'"

Kindness from Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, p. 38
By Yiyun Li
Published 2010

The Tiger's Wife

"You must be joking," he said. "Look around. Think for a moment. It's the middle of the night, not a soul anywhere. In this city, at this time. Not a dog in the gutter. Empty. Except for this elephant - and you're going to tell your idiot friends about it? Why? Do you think they'll understand it? Do you think it will matter to them?"

The Tiger's Wife, p. 55
By Téa Obreht
Published 2011

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

"It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to the point where none of it seems real. Well, sometimes, I can do that, but I don't need an hour in front of a mirror. It happens very fast, and things start to slip away. And I just open my eyes, and I see nothing. And then I start to breathe really hard trying to see something, but I can't. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it scares me."

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, p. 74
By Stephen Chbosky
Published 1999

Death: A Life

"I feel that I have important things to do, and important things to say, and I want to share them with all Creation, I just don't know what they are exactly. But I can feel something. My true calling is buried deep inside me, I know it is! I just don't know how to get at it. Can you tell me? Can You help me understand my true role in existence? Can You tell me what I'm doing here?"

Death: A Life, p. 40
By George Pendle
Published 2008

The Keep

"When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom ― those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and you were known. Two-way recognition."

The Keep, p. 6
By Jennifer Egan
Published 2006

The Virgin Suicides

"We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another and to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together."

The Virgin Suicides, p. 43
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Published 1993

The Man of My Dreams

"And yet attending to things that make Hannah unhappy - it's such a natural reflex. It feels so intrinsic, it feels in some ways like who she is. The unflattering observations she makes about other people, the comments that get her in trouble, aren't these truer than small talk and thank-you notes? Worse, but truer. And underneath all the decorum, isn't most everyone judgmental and disappointed? Or is is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them - can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in?"

The Man of My Dreams, p. 139
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Published 2006

The Magicians

Photo: Here and here.

"As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and and one-time variations as there were rules."

The Magicians, p. 149
By Lev Grossman
Published 2009