Linnea's Bookshelf > Linnea's Bookshelf's Quotes

“I've seen how easy it is for people to be manipulated, Emeka,' I say sadly. 'All it takes is careful observation of trends and behavioural patterns and it can be pretty easy to make people do what you want them to do. Especially in a group.”
― Femi Kayode, Lightseekers

“It doesn't matter. There will always be a Tamuno around us. You see it everywhere. Politicians. Businessmen. People who prey on our fear of each other for their selfish gains.'

'It scares me,' Omereji says sadly. 'And it's true what you say. But what scares me most is seeing how easily people can be manipulated.”
― Femi Kayode, Lightseekers

“I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“Peace was like any high. It couldn't last. It was an illusion, something that could be interrupted in a moment and lost forever.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don't give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices… Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“The people who loved you, the ones who really cared, they would always come back. Sometimes, they even came back from the dead.”
― Holly Jackson, The Reappearance of Rachel Price

“because everybody left eventually, but it hurt less. That was what life was, choosing the way that hurt less.”
― Holly Jackson, The Reappearance of Rachel Price

“People were temporary. It was the one thing you could count on: people always left,”
― Holly Jackson, The Reappearance of Rachel Price

“Some hurts were good: friends grew apart, people moved away, they left. It didn’t have to last forever to count. Things ended, this was ending, but that didn’t mean it never mattered.”
― Holly Jackson, The Reappearance of Rachel Price

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Sometimes I think," she said slowly, "that if a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn't make it past noon.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational systems, and choosers of our behaviors. In short, the reduction of women to something less than men, and the elevation of men to something more than women, is not biological: it’s cultural. And it starts with two words: pink and blue. Everything skyrockets out of control from there.” Speaking”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“No surprise. Idiots make it into every company. They tend to interview well.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Imagine if all men took women seriously. Education would change. The workforce would revolutionize. Marriage counsellors would go out of business. Do you see my point?”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“some things needed to stay in the past because the past was the only place they made sense.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Whenever you start doubting yourself, whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change and change is what we're chemically designed to do.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“Whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change - and change is what we're chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others' opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what YOU will change. And then get started.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“It’s just that we tend to treat pregnancy as the most common condition in the world—as ordinary as stubbing a toe—when the truth is, it’s like getting hit by a truck. Although obviously a truck causes less damage.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry