Book Quotes

Here are some of my favorite passages from books I have read:

"I came home, and the only things people were interested in were things just beyond my comprehension. Who cared about Jennifer Lopez? How was it that I was watching CNN one morning and there was a story about freaking ducks being fished out of a sewer drain–while the story of soldiers getting killed in Iraq got relegated to this little banner across the bottom of the screen? Ducklings getting pulled out of a sewer. How was this important to our country?
I was not understanding what was going on. I was not grasping anything.
How was i willing to go and die for these f--king people who wear sweatshirts with little kittens on them? Or these people with sequins who bump into me with their carts at the supermarket and then look at me like I'm an asshole?
It's a very strange country we live in."

Kayla Williams, Love My Rifle More Than You - Young and Female in the U.S. Army


"Phil wiped his plate mournfully, while I toyed with a crust of bread, overcome with the sort of plummeting despair you feel when you're driving coast to coast and suddenly realize, in the dead of the night, that you've been going in the wrong direction for the past three hours, the oil light is flashing, you're nearly out of gas, and your dog is not curled comfortably asleep in the back seat as you'd supposed but abandoned along the strip of crapped-over grass at the last truck stop."

T. Coraghessan Boyle, Budding Prospects


"Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, untill then, been hidden from me."

Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress


"The way to shop when you have a limit on money and you don't want to be bothered every morning picking out and matching up items in your wardrobe is to buy everything alike."

Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster


"Yet the resilience of trees is something I have always counted on. It supports a certain confidence that life will go on, noticed, or unnoticed."

Stephanie Kaza, The Attentive Heart



"You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are different to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity.


"We sat there. I wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain, but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, 'Ow'.”

M.T. Anderson, Feed