More From The Walking Library

Here's another quotedump for all of you quote-a-holics. Yes, I do compile and jot down quotes that I favor from the books I read.

ONE DAY, David Nicholls

The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.

The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.

You can't throw years of your life away because it makes a funny anecdote.

Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.

Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.

I know from your letters and from seeing you after your play that you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that's okay, that's alright, because we're all meant to be like that at twenty-four. In fact, our whole generation is like that. I read an article about it, it's because we never fought in a war or watched too much television or something. Anyways, the only people with oars and rudders and aims are dreary bores and squares and careerists like Tilly-bloody-Killick or Callum O'Neill and his refurbished computers.

This letter builds to a life-changing climax. I wonder if you're ready for it yet.

Envy was just the tax you paid on success.

Don't keep fighting battles that are already lost.

They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. - Thomas Hardy, Far From the Maddening Crowd

Happy in that they were not over happy.

"Live each day as if it's you last", that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with you passion and your electronic typewriter and work hard at... something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.

THE CARRIE DIARIES, Candace Bushnell

How far would you go to get what you wanted?

There are 2 ways of getting what you wanted in life: forcing people to give it to you, or making them want to give it to you.

You don't want to peak in high school. If you do, the rest of your life is a disaster.

I have this theory: If you forgive someone, they can't hurt you anymore.

And like a newborn child, I enter my future in darkness.

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, Lisa Kleypas

Sometimes silence could wound someone nearly as badly as a bullet.

There is comfort in ritual, isn’t there?

1. Any food is fair game until it is actually swallowed by someone else.
2. Take a nap whenever you can.
3. Don’t bark unless it’s important.
4. Chasing one’s tail is sometimes unavoidable.

One could never put a price on each life that had been damaged or lost.

The air was charged with the promise of... something.

Bad enough to love a man who didn’t love her. But it was exponentially worse to love a man who actively disliked her.

One had the sense that no matter what she beheld of the sinful world, she would never be jaded.

I've always thought there's a fair amount of dishonesty involved in politeness.

Dreams have a way of eclipsing reality.

To err is human, to forgive, canine.

We love silent guests - it allows us to talk all the more. By all means, sit and say nothing.

There was nothing so trying as pretending you were happy when you weren't

Boldness be my friend - William Shakespeare, Cymbeline: Act 1, Scene 6

"He's a man, dear," Amelia explained kindly. "Sustained thinking is very difficult for them." "As opposed to women," Leo retorted, "who have the remarkable ability to make decisions without doing any thinking at all."

The trick was forgetting about what she had lost... and learning to go on with what she had left.

Jealousy is quite unfashionable these days. One must have the sophistication to be amused by the attentions paid to one's wife.

And before I tell you about it, I want to make it clear that there is only one reasonable side of the issue. Mine.

THE DUKE'S CAPTIVE, Adele Ashworth

A gem unpolished is just another rock.

A lot can change in a very short time.

PROMISE ME TONIGHT, Sara Lindsey

That was the problem with trying to wound someone you loved. In the end, you were only hurting yourself.

In a household full of women, men must stick together for survival.

So we shall be one, and one another's all. - John Donne, Lovers' Infiniteness

TEMPTING THE MARQUESS, Sara Lindsey

So we shall be one, and one another's all. - John Donne, Lovers' Infiniteness

A will forged of iron.

Love is every bit as destructive as war.

I have found life is much simple if one ceases to have expectations.

Leave thy vain bibble-babble. - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: Act IV, Scene 2

Thank you for that astute observation. Your ability to state the obvious by means of circuitous logic never ceases to amaze me.

Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere. - Petrarch
[Books lead some to knowledge, some to madness.]

An insult in a foreign language is still an insult.

They don't call it the parson's mousetrap for nothing.

Unrequited lust.

Was home truly where the heart was, adjustable to wherever a person's loved ones might be? Could a person have more than one home in which he or she truly belonged? Or was a person meant to have just one home, but that home changed over time just as people changed over time?

Let the battle begin.

Men and women are rarely capable of lasting friendship. Someone always wants something more than the other can give.

That spectacular failure of a kiss.

Mind battled body and for today, at least, mind won out.

I would rather be a cynic and have my feet firmly planted on the ground than be a hopeless dreamer drifting among the clouds.

He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural. - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: Act II, Scene 3

Could she admit that desiring a fallen angel had greater appeal than worshipping one on high from afar? Was it possible for love to be at once sacred and profane?

Was he willing to abandon a lifetime of virtue for a bit of pleasure?
Absolutely.
There you had it.
How low the mighty had fallen.

Damn the treacherous hearts of women.

Journeys end in lovers meeting - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: Act II, Scene 3

This was why she hadn't wanted to fall in love. She's known it would end in disappointment, but oh, how it hurt to be right.

The course of true love never did run smooth. - William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream: Act I, Scene 1

A KISS AT MIDNIGHT, Eloisa James

So... rain rather than blinding sun.

Beddable would be nice; biddable was a necessity.

One never asks a lady to set her own price. If you have to ask, the answer will always be more than you can afford.

If that's love, I want nothing to do with it.

It must be your beauty. It brought out that rare moment of truth in me.

He's male. I've noticed that sometimes the brains simply get left out of the package.

He felt as if the whole world held its breath for that second.

[ENGLISH] People favor uncomfortable truths.

Never from this palace of dim night will I depart again. - William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: Act V, Scene 3

One should never hope that men will rise to the occasion; they don't, as a matter of course.

THE CHAMBER, John Grisham

A bleeding heart.

Boom goes the dynamite.

The horror of death row is that you die a little each day. the waiting kills you. you live in a cage and when you wake up you mark off another day and you tell yourself that you are now one day closer to death.

Their dreams sustained them from one miserable day to the next.

The journey will be rough, but the rewards will be worth it.

The actual act of dying would not be too terrible.

The idea was Adam's brainchild.

Where do you hide when you're running from life?

Give 'em hell.

How in the world could you have become anything other than yourself? you never had a chance.

What a heartbroken bunch of people.

I'm not afraid of death, but I'm afraid of dying.

The waiting is cruel.

The end came quickly.

How can you be lost when you don't know where you're going?

HIGH FIDELITY, Nick Hornby

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music hascaused unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one companct frame.

It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

Lonely people are the bitterest of them all.

WINTERGIRLS, Laurie Halse Anderson

I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy.
I am the circus freak encased in beeswax.
I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

I am contagious.

It's called a wake but nobody really wants the dead to rise.

Suspended animation isn't much of a life.

There you have it, folks. Enjoy! I hope you take the time and pick up some of the books I've stolen these quotes from.


Peace,
Essa.