Kelsey > Kelsey's Quotes

“We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can't see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“I will come back as a little breeze. You will feel me on your face, and you will know that I am still listening. So you can still talk to me.”
― Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep

“Reading can take you places you have never been before.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven't met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you.”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“Amy might not have had the most exciting life over the past few years, up here in her room, but she must have been fighting death to the very end. Sara could understand why she had been in denial or so long. It must have been a frightening realization: so many books she would never get to pick up, so many stories that would happen without her, so many authors she would never get to discover.

That night, Sara sat in Amy's library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met.”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“I really can't say which of the American classics you should read. In fact, I think about as much of the notion of "classic" as you do, but at least the literary critics who compile those lists have a good sense of humor. How else can you explain them adding Mark Twain's wonderful books to their lists, given his view that "a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read"? Unless it's some kind of disguised jibe, but they surely can't be that petty.
Though I don't think that justice is the main argument against classics list. Or rather, in a way it's clearly a question of justice, but not against those who don't make it. No, the books I feel sorry for are the ones they add to these lists. Take Mark Twain again. Once, when Tom was young, he came to me complaining that he had to read Huckleberry Finn for junior high. Huckleberry Finn! Our critics and educators have got a lot to answer for when they manage to make young boys see stories about rebellion and adventure and ballsiness as a chore. Do you understand what I mean? The real crime of these lists isn't that they leave deserving books off them, but that they make people see fantastic literary adventures as obligations.”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Sometimes I'm happy when he's gone, but I'm always happy when he returns. -Clare”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“She traveled the world and wrote books and took lovers and broke hearts. She didn't allow life just to happen to her. She punched and pummeled and beat the living shit out of it. She mauled it.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea.”
― Katarina Bivald, The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

“When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings