Annika > Annika's Quotes

“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”
― Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books

“It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“[My mom's] funny that way, celebrating special occasions with blue food. I think it's her way of saying anything is possible. Percy can pass seventh grade. Waffles can be blue. Little miracles like that.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters

“Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.”
― Helen Humphreys, Coventry

“You can't just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.”
― Stephen Chbosky

“I will not play at tug o' war.
I'd rather play at hug o' war,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“I read like the flame reads the wood.”
― Alfred Döblin

“Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger

“I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?

"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“You have to take your own bold approach, and if you do you will be rewarded with success.
Or calamitous failure. That can happen too.”
― Steven Moffat

“I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow”
― Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems

“I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I nodded, looking at Rachel with respect. "You hit the Lord of the Titans in the eye with a blue plastic hairbrush.”
― Rick Riordan

“I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.”
― Felicia Johnson

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We're not dating," Alec said again.
"Oh?" Magnus said. "So you're just that friendly with everybody, is that it?”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“You know," Gabriel said, "there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will."

"There was a time I thought I was a ferret," Will said, "but that turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Because I didn't.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.”
― John Green

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“He pinched the remaining chapters’ pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book.”
― David S.E. Zapanta, Posthumous

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else's imagination. My life was suspended - I was in neither one place nor the other.”
― Kate Kerrigan, Ellis Island

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief