Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.

There is, I think, a fear of love.

There is a fear of love.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we're afraid of is about the width of an eyelash.”
― Jay McInerney

“It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“Love each other or perish”
― Auden

“But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.”
― Paul Auster, Ghosts

“Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.”
― David Almond, My Name Is Mina

“Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.”
― David Almond, My Name Is Mina

“One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. ... I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“That's one of the amazing things great books like this do - they don't just get you to see the world differently, they get you to look at people, the people all around you, differently.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“The world is complicated,’ she added. ‘You don’t have to have one emotion at a time.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“...when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn't the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn't what you give in exchange for something; it's what you feel when you are blessed--blessed to have family and friends who care about you, and who want to see you happy. Hence the joy from thanking.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in human conversation.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“For this day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“If you stayed at home, you might not get the opportunity to go to that place again. But if you went, you could always com back.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“Kabat-Zinn writes, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“That's one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we can all talk about when we don't want to talk about ourselves.”
― Will Schwalbe

“And I’m also talking about kindness, not just about being nice. You can be gruff or abrupt and still be kind. Kindness has much more to do with what you do than how you do it.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“One of Mom's favorite passages from Gilead was: "This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation.?"...But the question from Gilead, Mom said, was always the thing you needed to ask yourself: "What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?" It helped you remember that people aren't here for you; everyone is here for one another.”
― Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”
― W.H. Auden

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Ignorance, the root and stem of every evil.”
― Plato

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
― Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero