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My favorite book quotes
I have many fond childhood memories of my family heading to the mall on weekends and the summers to spend hours the entire day at the bookstore. We would sit on the ground reading all day and would leave the store with a large basket of books to read at home. This fostered in me a love for reading and literature that I still carry with me today. In the little free time that I scrape together, I read books and make a conscious effort to read different genres and different styles. I personally love the smooth and immersive writing style of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and my favorite genres are contemporary classics and post-war fiction. This page has some of my favorite quotes. Follow me on Goodreads where I sometimes write shorter reviews and check out my Blog for longer book reviews and other musings!
"I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
"Sometimes you can't worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go."
- Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father
"It should have come as no surprise to me that on Capitol Hill jokes got screened, irony became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon, and passion was considered dangerous."
- Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
"If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred had made me so. If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me."
- Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
"You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you loved him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?"
- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
"We have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionally."
- Susan Cain, Quiet
"So does every ill that flesh is heir to. What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you'd need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague."
- Albert Camus, The Plague
"There is indeed a peculiar charm, both in friendship and in Eros, about those moments when Appreciative love lies, as it were, curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship (free as solitude, yet neither is alone) wraps us round. No need to talk. No need to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire."
- C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
"The wind usually blows."
- a quote of Wilbur Wright from the biography The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
"What looks like a straight line turns out to be a curve. A tiny fraction of error could scale; a trivial multiplier could propagate into a cascade. A fragment of a degree in the angle of approach was the difference between a stable orbit and slingshotting into deep space; a fraction of a second's lag in a clock could make a GPS system put an aeroplane into a mountain. The curvature of a miniscus could scatter light, or focus it to a point."
- Sam Leith, The Coincidence Engine
"'You're a watchful guy. You know where that comes from?' I shook my head. 'It comes from feeling out of place,' he said. 'Believe me. I know.'"
- Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
"In this -- Valparaiso's former aspirations to grandeur -- I was reminded of Lahore and of that saying, so evocative in our language: the ruins proclaim the building was beautiful."
- Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
"She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?"
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
"The nameless workers, so diligent while they lived, had presently died, and only the Chijimi remained, the plaything of men like Shimamura, cool and fresh against the skin in the summer. This rather unremarkable thought struck him as most remarkable. The labor into which a heart has poured its whole love--where will it have its say, to excite and inspire, and when?"
- Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country
"I made the choice to learn, but it was more than that--I learned to trust: to drop my shields and be vulnerable. I have rarely been disappointed when I do. That, to me, is strength and why I believe in the goodness of human nature. When you're vulnerable, you create the strongest bonds and the most inspiring possibilities."
- Maria Ressa, How to Stand Up to a Dictator
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