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Top Ten Inspirational/Thought Provoking Book Quotes

Happy Top Ten Tuesday over at That Artsy Reader Girl!

1. "Some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don't lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place."

-The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

2. "He had strabismus, a quality Lulay used to spout about as a feature shared by mystics, geniuses, thieves, imaginative children, and those possessed by kapres. One eye looked the world in the face. The other eye needed a break and wandered off."

-America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

3. “I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. She could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She could not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that is was this fact of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness—that would, finally, save me.”

-Educated by Tara Westover

4. “You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

-Dear Sugar/Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

5. “You have to understand

That no one puts their children on a boat

Unless the water is safer than the land.”

-“Home” by Warsan Shire

6. “An evil spirit rose from the abyss

To kindle in our hearts the flames of hate

By which our tender youth had been divided.

It grew with us, and bad, designing men

Fann’d with their ready breath the fatal fire”

-Mary

-Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller

7. “All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one...It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.”

-The Girl Who Circumnagivated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

8. "How would you run an empire without cheap, disposable labor? It was as impossible a question as how you could run one without conquest and expansion.”

-Shattered Pillars by Elizabeth Bear

9. “The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about."

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

10. “There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about... If Sylvia were a character in a book, that’s the kind of character she’d want to be. But wouldn’t.”

–The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

Comments

Lydia said…
The first quote on your list was amazing. Now I have to read The Stone Sky!

My TTT.
@Linda I highly, highly recommend it! The Stone Sky is the last in the wonderful and poignant Broken Earth trilogy, which begins with The Fifth Season.

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