Favourite Quotes from the Last Five Books I Read

“But Helen, he may have gone, but I am still here, and now what am I supposed to do with all this love?”

“They made me think of my students, who are so young and look at the road ahead of them happily, having no idea that the road narrows and turns back on itself, and goes through dark places, and is covered all over with things to trip you up and break your ankles.”

“She finds herself unwilling to raise her head to the window, as if she might see beyond the glass a face with an expression of loneliness so imploring as to be cruel. (And since she will not look, you must.)”

“I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

“Please don’t talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation,” Kya whispered with a slight edge.”

“Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would.”

“But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse.”

“Well, that’s one of the paradoxes of life. You can’t have it all. You can have some of this and some of that or all of this and none of that. We make the trade-offs we think are best at the time.”

“People don’t come into our lives by accident.”

“…at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”

“You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.”

“People will tell you not to waste your youth having too much fun, but they’re wrong. Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it. So do the right thing with your youth, Vivian—squander it.”

“And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there.”

“There was no real way for a person to try something out, see if he liked it…because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.”

“The thought landed lightly and easily, and as soon as Peter noted it there, everything that hadn’t quite made sense made sense again.”