Pg 1 Quotes

Pg.1- "I have light brown, almost red hair and greenish-grey eyes. I wish they were more grey, because I hate most guys that have green eyes, but I have to be content with what I have."
pg ?- "Can you see the sunset real good from the west side?" She blinked, startled, then smiled. "Real good."
"You can see it from the east side, too," I said quietly.
"Thanks, Ponyboy." She smiled through her tears. "You dig okay."
She had green eyes. I went on, walking home slowly. ~ S.E. Hinton

You may have started as my daughter, but it was always understood that one day you would be a wife, mother, and contributor to this Messiah's kingdom. I will never ask anything from you again, but an entire world will.
pg 1 ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life. (Will Durant, Story of Civilization, pg 1, vol. 1) ~ Will Durant

Another day done" - he would sigh - "and who knows what the morrow will bring us, eh, Dunk? ~ George R R Martin

pg. 245 ...there probably isn't a marriage or a relationship or a friendship anywhere today that wasn't jump-started by trivia. ~ Ken Jennings

There are choices you have to make not just once, but everytime they come up. ~ Luis J Rodriguez

...a dangerous heat came off of her, murky and wild, like a swamp.
pg. 11 ~ Rebecca Barry

It's us, you know, it's us who can't handle that kind of love. We're apes. Literally. We don't know shit about unconditional love. So we fight it, because on some level we don't even believe it's possible. ~ Madeline Ashby From VN The First Machine Dynasty Pg. 158 Par. 4

Sometimes it's braver not to fight. Protect them, and save your vengeance for another day. ~ Cassandra Clare

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last ... But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade ... We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157) ~ Michelle Richmond

Emily Dickinson once wrote, 'hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,' and she was right, but she forgot to mention that despair is the thing with claws that tears out your heart. Kind of a major oversight there, Em." pg. 25 ~ Suzanne Sullivan

I used to think ... that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place ... But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that. ~ Anthony Doerr

The purpose of Christian education is not academic: it is religious and practical. ~ Rousas John Rushdoony

PG-13 horror, I just don't watch that. ~ Fede Alvarez

You know that I hate you, Roark. I hate you for what you are, for wanting you, for having to want you. I'm going to fight you-and I'm going to destroy you-and I tell you this as calmly as I told you that I'm a begging animal. I'm going to pray that you can't be destroyed-I tell you this, too-even though I believe in nothing and have nothing to pray to. But I will fight to block every step you take. I will fight to tear every chance you want away from you. I will hurt you through the only thing that can hurt you-through your work. I will fight to starve you, to strangle you on the things you won't be able to reach. I have done it to you to today-and that is why I shall sleep with you tonight. Part 2, Chapter 7, pg. 272-3 The Fountainhead ~ Ayn Rand

Sleep is still difficult I sleep for three or four hours a day. Usually sometime in the afternoon. I walk in the cold, keep myself numb. I cry less, and less. (James Frey, pg.88) ~ James Frey

No,' I said, shooting him a look. 'But you don't have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.'
You don't have to assume the worst about everyone, either. THe world isn't always out to get you.'
In your opinion,' I added.
Look,' he said, 'the point is there's no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. so you're left with a choice. Eitherhope for the best, or just expect the worst.'
If you expect the worst you're never disappointed,' I pointed out.

~Ruby and Nate, pg 259 ~ Sarah Dessen

Love: that which cannot be done without; wish always to be with, be part of, belong to, know intimately inside and out, entirely, WHOLE-LY, for ever and ever amen.
Shining bright words in amazing patterns of endless variety. Drawing of the inside of my head.
pg. 108 ~ Aidan Chambers

Who among us is free? Only those who see their chains know what freedom means.-pg. 123 Welland Hevington, A Memoir The Demon's Daughter ~ Emma Holly

Maybe secrets are only told when you're trying to protect the real truth from coming out. pg 168 ~ Jill Bialosky

No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned in my stomach, to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my throat without voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking (pg.244). ~ Catherine Lacey

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze. ~ Arundhati Roy

If we are looking for insurance against want and oppression, we will find it only in our neighbors' prosperity and goodwill and, beyond that, in the good health of our worldly places, our homelands. If we were sincerely looking for a place of safety, for real security and success, then we would begin to turn to our communities - and not the communities simply of our human neighbors but also of the water, earth, and air, the plants and animals, all the creatures with whom our local life is shared.
(pg. 59, "Racism and the Economy") ~ Wendell Berry

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.
We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53) ~ Sarah Vowell

In that light, across the field, is all I will never have. Next to me is all I will. ~ Andrea Barrett

My mother always told me if I rode a motorcycle with a boy, she'd kill me."
...
She couldn't hear him laugh, but she felt his body shake. "She wouldn't say that if she knew me," he called back to her confidently. "I'm an excellent driver."
-Clary & Jace, pg.289- ~ Cassandra Clare

So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties. ~ Thrity Umrigar

It is you who need to go, Amende. Go home; your friends are waiting for you. Pg.63 ~ Obehi Peter Ewanfoh

For although I feel that I know a tremendous lot, I am not yet aware how much there is in the world to find out about. It will take me a little time to discover whether I am very wise or very foolish - Jack Pumpkinhead - The Marvellous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum pg 20 chapter 2 ~ L. Frank Baum

What was he doing during the trip? What was he thinking about? As he had during the morning, he watched the trees go by, the thatched roofs, the cultivated fields, and the dissolving views of the countryside that change at every turn of the road. Scenes like that are sometimes enough for the soul, and almost eliminate the need for thought. To see a thousand objects for the first and last time, what could be more profoundly melancholy? Traveling is a constant birth and death. It may be that in the murkiest part of his mind, he was drawing a comparison between these changing horizons and human existence. All aspects of life are in perpetual flight before us. Darkness and light alternate: after a flash, an eclipse; we look, we hurry, we stretch out our hands to seize what is passing; every event is a turn in the road; and suddenly we are old. We feel a slight shock, everything is black, we can make out a dark door, the gloomy horse of life that was carrying us stops, and we see a veiled and unknown form that turns him out into the darkness. (pg. 248) ~ Victor Hugo

... Like most youngest children, he had trouble remembering his own past. The older ones did it so well for him, why should he bother? They had built him a second-hand memory that included the years before he existed, even. He had a distinct memory of Melissa's running away from home with a peanut sandwich and a pomegranate, two years before he was born; but he himself, with his locust on a leash, had vanished.
-- pg 273-74 ~ Anne Tyler

Allusion is lovely, and experience with other forms of writing brings the ability to use that device pervasively. This in turn sets high expectations for the reader- in that you are expecting him to pick up on it- and this is a way of respecting your readers. And when you respect your readers, they will come to respect you. ~ Douglas Wilson

Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters. ~ Cressida Cowell

A series of howls and war cries echoed through the camp ... The werewolves and Japanese had attacked.
-pg.353 Forbidden Nights with a Vampire Kerrelyn Sparks ~ Kerrelyn Sparks

I needed this eternal truth [...] I needed the sense that this invisible world was somehow propping up the visible one, that this one, true line extended infinitely, without width or area, confidently piercing through the shadows. Somehow, this line would help me find peace. ~ Yoko Ogawa

While the government is "studying" and funding and organizing its Big Thought, nothing is being done. But the citizen who is willing to Think Little, and, accepting the discipline of that, to go ahead on his own, is already solving the problem. A man who is trying to live as a neighbor to his neighbors will have a lively and practical understanding of the work of peace and brotherhood, and let there be no mistake about it - he is doing that work ...
A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.
(pg.87, "Think Little") ~ Wendell Berry

That's what tears are for, after all. A way for the soul to bleed. Pg. 109 ~ Cody McFadyen

Go with the flow--because you can't fight a tide God sets in motion~ pg. 41 ~ Irene Hannon

Good spending decisions are made when we know we're spending money, not fooled into thinking we're saving money. --pg 52 ~ Cristin Frank