Brad > Brad's Quotes

“For the most part, you don't hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“To love someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love in everything new, you wonder every morning that this is one's own, as if they are afraid that someone will suddenly come tumbling through the door and say that there has been a serious mistake and that it simply was not meant to would live so fine. But as the years go by, the facade worn, the wood cracks here and there, and you start to love this house not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not. You become familiar with all its nooks and crannies. How to avoid that the key gets stuck in the lock if it is cold outside. Which floorboards have some give when you step on them, and exactly how to open the doors for them not to creak. That's it, all the little secrets that make it your home.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“People talk about grief as emptiness, but it's not empty. It's full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you'd have.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“Love does that. It makes you feel infinite and invincible, like the whole world is open to you, anything is achievable, and each day will be filled with wonder. Maybe it’s the act of opening yourself up, letting someone else in— or maybe it’s the act of caring so deeply about another person that it expands your heart. I’ve heard so many people say some version of I never knew how much I could love another human being until . . . And after the until is usually something like my niece was born or I gave birth to a child or I adopted a baby. I never knew how much I could love another human being until I met you, Gabe.
I’ll never forget that.”
― Jill Santopolo, The Light We Lost

“That's what love can do for you if you let it: build a person out of all your broken pieces. It doesn't matter if the stitches show. The stitches, the scars just prove you earned it.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

“I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I'm going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I'll never know.”
― Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days

“She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“I would have come for you. And if I couldn't walk, I'd crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we'd fight our way out together-knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that's what we do. We never stop fighting.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Crows remember human faces. They remember the people who feed them, who are kind to them. And the people who wrong them too. They don’t forget. They tell each other who to look after and who to watch out for.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“And there in the darkness of the hotel room, scarcely more than twenty-four hours before the maybe end of the world, the three of them managed to laugh together. It turned out that no amount of terror could stop the great human need to connect. Or maybe, Anita thought, terror was actually at the heart of that need. After all, every life ended in an apocalypse, in one way or another.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little less alone in the world.”
― Tommy Wallach, We All Looked Up

“When any worthwhile thing is done in the world, it's usually done by somebody weird.”
― John Sandford, Outrage

“Chet! What are you eating?”

Nothing. It was true. The eating part was over.”
― Spencer Quinn, Dog on It

“I’d been the best leaper in K-9 class, which had led to all the trouble in a way I couldn’t remember exactly, although blood was involved.”
― Spencer Quinn, Dog on It

“You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“Some mistakes... Just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you. You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“You can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Um, because you're loopier than Flacky McPsycho, Mayor of Crazytown?"

"My databases show no record of this Crazytown of which you speak. A brain the size of an entire city burns inside me. My intelligence quotient is beyond the human scale. I would prefer if you did not refer to me in such a fashion."

"Oh, poor baby. Did I hurt the mass-murdering psychopathic artificial intelligence's feelings?”
― Amie Kaufman, Illuminae

“They are beyond me.
These humans.
With their brief lives and their tiny dreams and their hopes that seem as fragile as glass.
Until you see them by starlight, that is.”
― Amie Kaufman, Illuminae

“The universe owes you nothing...It has already given you everything, after all. It was here long before you, and it will go on long after you. The only way it will remember you is if you do something worthy of remembrance.”
― Amie Kaufman, Illuminae

“If you turn people away enough times, eventually they stop trying to find you.”
― Harriet Reuter Hapgood, The Square Root of Summer

“After nearly a year of mourning, I feel like the Victorians when Edison came along- all those years in the darkness, and then electric light. I've got the earth between my toes.”
― Harriet Reuter Hapgood, The Square Root of Summer

“We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“You do not write your life with words...You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Stories are wild creatures, the monster said. When you let them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak?”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Stories are the wildest things of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls