...Quotables @ Bookshelf ...

seribulan

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

bianglala

“People always say life is too short for regrets. But the truth is, it’s too long.”

SARAH ADDISON ALLEN, THE PEACH KEEPER

bianglala

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

PHILIP K. DICK, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

bianglala

“Every poem is a love poem, my dad had said. I’d always thought he meant romantic love…but there were so many kinds of great love: mother and daughter love. Father love. Best friend love. Aunt love. Mother’s best friend love. Friendish friendesque love. Love for the living and love for the dead. Love for who you really are, for those weird parts of yourself that only a few people understand. Love for things you yearn to do, for putting words in a page. Love for traveling, for people and seeing new ways to live. Love for the world…”

MARGO RABB, KISSING IN AMERICA

bianglala

“I run. I kick. I punch. I listen. I write. I give.
I live.
Stars above, I live.”

HEATHER LYONS, THE DEEP END OF THE SEA

bianglala

“One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.”

KATARINA BIVALD, THE READERS OF BROKEN WHEEL RECOMMEND

bianglala

“Maybe the people who tell you to trust them can’t be trusted, and the people who ask nothing are the ones who are there when you need them.”

SARI WILSON, GIRL THROUGH GLASS: A NOVEL

bianglala

“We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”

JANE YOLEN, THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC

bianglala

“What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn’t just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. We had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, and the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them perfect, and we couldn’t expect them to be. You can’t make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build your world from it.”

SARAH DESSEN, LOCK AND KEY

bianglala

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines – it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

ROBIN SLOAN, MR. PENUMBRA’S 24-HOUR BOOKSTORE

bianglala

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

NELSON MANDELA, LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

bianglala

“Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can’t be done. You damage them,“ he said. ‘As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won’t ever fly the same. It’s kinder to let them go.”

SUSANNA KEARSLEY, THE ROSE GARDEN

bianglala

“There were two ways of playing the rest of the game, by lying low and waiting for something to happen - or by forcing the pace so that something had to happen”

IAN FLEMING, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

bianglala

“Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage.
But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.”

VERONIA ROTH, ALLEGIANT

bianglala

“You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you’ve lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.”

JONATHAN TROPPER, THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU

bianglala

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

SALMAN RUSHDIE, MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

seribulan

Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.

— Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

bianglala

"I stood up and retrieved a sketchbook and a soft pencil from my studio. I sat back down on the sofa, ready to draw a portrait of the man with no face. But I had no idea where to begin, or how to get started. There was only a void, and how are you supposed to give form to something that does not exist? And the milky fog that surrounded the void was continually changing shape."

HARUKI MURAKAMI, KILLING COMMENDATORE

bianglala

“Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within. My job was to uncover this and, if the surface is fogged up (which was more than the case), polish it with a cloth to make it shine again. Otherwise the darker side would naturally reveal itself in the portrait.”

HARUKI MURAKAMI, KILLING COMMENDATORE

bianglala

"Like a mist suddenly blown away by a freshening breeze, he vanished into thin air. All that remained was the unoccupied chair and the glass table. The penguin charm was gone from the tabletop."

HARUKI MURAKAMI, KILLING COMMENDATORE