j w > j's Quotes

“It’s just that I’m the kind of person," Rebecca continued, "that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

“Finding someone you love and who loves you back is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. But finding a true soul mate is an even better feeling. A soul mate is someone who understands you like no other, loves you like no other, will be there for you forever, no matter what. They say that nothing lasts forever, but I am a firm believer in the fact that for some, love lives on even after we're gone.”
― Cecilia Ahern, P.S. I Love You

“On the other hand, she was a women with a million happy memories, who knew what it was like to experience true love and who was ready to experience more life, more love and make new memories. Whether it happened in ten months or ten years, Holly would obey Gerry's final message. Whatever lay ahead, she knew she would open her heart and follow where it led.
In the meantime, she would just live.”
― Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You

“She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.”
― Cecelia Ahern, P.S. I Love You

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
― 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

“There are moments when troubles enter our lives and we can do nothing to avoid them.
But they are there for a reason. Only when we have overcome them will we understand why they were there.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Fifth Mountain

“It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.”
― Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange

“When you're happy for yourself, it fills you. When you're happy for someone else, it pours over.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, Garden Spells

“Men of thoughtless actions are always surprised by consequences.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“Blank-slate friendships were thin and temperamental. She knew that. There was no history there to cement people together, for better or worse.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“I spent so much time telling myself that this wasn't home that I started to believe it,” she said carefully. “Belonging has always been tough for me.”

“I can be your home,” he said quietly. “Belong to me.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Girl Who Chased the Moon

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Swan Thieves

“He would not let her go. Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing though each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean—oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“Books can be possessive, can't they? You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what's inside will change your life, but sometimes you don't even have to read it. Sometimes it's a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven't even had their spines cracked. 'Why do you buy books you don't even read?' our daughter asks us. That's like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

“She accepted it from then on. Books liked her. Books wanted to look after her.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

“In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another...They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.”
― Chris Cleave, The Other Hand

“We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.”
― Chris Cleave, The Other Hand

“Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent."

Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."

I sighed and looked out at Little Bee

Well," I said, "maybe this is a developing world.”
― Chris Cleave

“What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find
in the grime of the everyday...he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

“It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.”
― Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin