Piper Caryl

“Joar's jaw ached from laughing so hard in a way he hadn't even known he could laugh before her, an all-encompassing laugh that his body seemed to have been keeping in reserve just in case he met a completely perfect idiot. Every time Ali heard it, she looked like her body had been saving an extra pair of eyes just for him, unused until that day.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don't think teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“History is about who we collectively are and how we feel about it. It's one of the attempted answers to the great human question: what the hell is going on? Most animals don't ask that question, which is why you can put a massive Ikea next to a field of sheep and they just go on grazing. Not even twenty minutes of bleats and gestures and questioning looks, they're just not interested. But a vast amount of human endeavour is an attempt to answer it in different ways: all the sciences and all the humanities. Microscopes, philosophies, religions and poems are all having a go.”
― David Mitchell

“Never before had I felt trapped, seduced, and caught up in a story the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language... That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind