Monday, February 23, 2009

Quote of the Moment

I've decided to add a new "gadget" to the sidebar of my blog - Quote of the Moment. I'm sure you all noticed it right away! Anyway, for those of you may already think I'm a crazy library lady, you now have irrefutable proof. For the past of couple of years, I have kept a notebook of quotes from the books I've read that have touched me or spoken to me in some way. I thought it might be fun to share them here. Maybe they will speak to you as well. Or maybe you will run away in fear when you realize how crazy I really am :)


Here is a list of all the quotes that have been featured in Quote of the Moment:

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be great than your fear of failure (Bill Cosby, 2/15/12)

At an early age, I had turned to reading as a way for the world to explain itself to me (Pat Conroy, My Reading Life, 5/19/11)

My book list kept lengthening, contrary to my nicely organized plan of attack. (Michael M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute, 3/23/11)

Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us to the end. (Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker, 3/6/11)

I like the idea of time on my own. (Francine Prose, Goldengrove, 2/26/11)

Really smart people absorbed a lot of worldly experience from literature, well beyond what anyone cold acquire in a single human life. (Julia Steiny, The Providence Journal, 2/13/11)

It's okay not to know what you want to be when you grow up. That means you're still growing. (Rita Lussier, The Providence Journal, 1/31/11)

Even beyond the teen years, parents still have to prove to their children that they are not as stupid as they think. (Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker, 1/21/11)

A year from now you may wish you had started today. (Karen Lamb, 1/6/11)

I have read so many books. (Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, 12/31/10)

...a mother's love. There was nothing like it. Nothing. It was made up of all other emotions, fear and dread and anxiety and hope and joy and faith. (Ann Hood, The Red Thread, 11/22/10)

Talking to her girls was always the best prescription for the blues. Except, or course, when those same conversations caused the blues... (Kristin Hannah, Winter Garden, 11/5/10)

Scarlett O'Hara was my kind of gal. She was tough, she was sassy, she knew what she wanted, and she never let anything or anyone get in her way. (Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses, posted 9/14/10)

Motherhood requires so much more than devotion, much more than simply love. (Michelle Richmond, A Year of Fog, posted 8/26/10)

From the first time I picked out my own books at the library, I never stopped reading. (Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education, posted 8/13/10)

If only she had known...how ephemeral childhood was, how quickly it vanished, she would have paid more attention. (Ayelet Waldman, Red Hook Road, posted 7/24/10)

We read books, talked books, argued over books and became dearer and dearer to one another. (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, posted 6/11/10)

Can there be any greater pleasure...than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen. (Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader, posted 5/31/10)

It's a human failing - this ability to blind ourselves to the terrible things that don't directly affect us. The is how The Holocaust happened - and it's something I think we need to question constantly in ourselves. (Minrose Gwin, The Queen of Palmyra, posted 5/11/10)

When you write things down, he explained, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned. (Melanie Benjamin, Alice I Have Been, posted 4/18/10)

"Everyone has trials and tribulations... Everyone. There ain't no problem on this great green earth helped by feeling sorry for yourself. Nope, not one." (Robert Hough, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, posted 3/31/10)

Each of us can find any truth we want within a few written lines. We can perceive prejudice in the most innocent of words if we are looking for it. But why do you want to? Why be angry when you can be serene? (Gail Ciampa, The Providence Journal, posted 3/17/10)

What matters most is how you live your life, not what you have to show for it. (Jenny Sanford, as quoted in People magazine, posted 3/14/10)

Novels taught me that history is dramatic. (Laura Amy Schlitz, author of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voice from a Medieval Village, posted 2/22/10)

Commitment isn't just a sign of love; it's a cause of love. (Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, posted 2/15/10)

To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity. (Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game, posted 1/30/10).

By their mid-forties, women know they're at a crossroads. They are still holding on to their younger selves, but they can also see their older selves pretty clearly. (Jeffrey Zaslow, The Girls from Ames, posted 1/11/10)

...there's no need to be stressed out by a self-imposed schedule. You just change it is all. (Marie, The Boston Bibliophile, posted 12/28/09)

We spend more than, when we feel less than. (Suze Orman, posted 12/2/09)

What he needed was internal calm uninterrupted by the outside world. (Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor, posted 11/22/09)

...books have a soul, the soul of the person who wrote them and of those who read them and dream about them. (Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game, posted 11/8/09)

I keep having the feeling that if I had more time I would have become a good mother. (Isla Morley, Come Sunday, posted 10/23/09)

I don't think you can give credit to other people for things going right in your life, any more than you can blame them for when they go wrong. (Isla Morley, Come Sunday, posted 10/14/09)

His father had said once that the hardest choices in life aren't between what's right and what's wrong but between what's right and what's best. (Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, posted 10/5/09)

She'll explain how important it is to have someone believe in you, how important it is to nourish dreams, especially your own. (Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe, posted 9/18/09)

...I think a life absent of inquiry is not a life worth living. (Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe, posted 9/10/09)

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books. (Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, posted 8/20/09)

...she understood the specific kind of appreciation that comes to a person witnessing a thing of beauty alone, how the spectacle seems to sit whole inside the soul, undiminished by conversation, by any attempt at translation or persuasion. (Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe, posted 8/11/09)

She reminds herself of the list of Cs, her personal laundry list for self-improvement: Don't control, don't criticize, don't complain. (Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe, posted 8/2/09)

We may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two branches - those who read books and those who do not. (Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, posted 7/25/09)

When someone knows your deepest self and still loves you, are you not a lucky man? (Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs, posted 7/1/09)

In other words, if no money is ever enough, why bother being preoccupied with trying to gather more of it? Work with what you have. (Laurie Abraham, The Secret Currency of Love, posted 6/23/09)

The books we retain and those we discard, those we read as well as those we decide not to, all say something about who we are. (Timothy Ryback, as quoted in the Providence Journal, posted 6/14/09)

I keep telling my myself how important it is to remember the difference between a tragedy and an inconvenience. (Francine Prose, Goldengrove, posted 6/8/09)

...she believed in the endless, bountiful possibilities of life, in redemption, in affirmation, in hope as a moral obligation. (Thrity Umrigar, The Weight of Heaven, posted 6/2/09)

That is what it is to love someone: to give whatever you can while taking what you must. (Hillary Jordan, Mudbound, posted 5/28/09)

These days it's ofd-fashioned, but I also believe in the idea of self-sufficiency, the individual's responsiblity for her own happiness. (Patricia Gaffney, The Saving Graces, posted 5/22/09)

The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday's canvas with today's paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret... (Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle, posted 5/17/09)

[Books] are gifts to the world, just waiting to be opened and passed on to another generation. (Ben Erickson, A Parting Gift, posted 5/11/09)

One lesson that was starting to make sense to me was that having a plan, even if it's a meager plan, is useful and gets you through. (Isabel Gillies, Happens Every Day, posted 5/4/09)

My failures were far too many ... and my successes far too few. I can say only that I did my best. (Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed, posted 4/30/09)

That's the interesting thing about books; they let you catch a glimpse of the world through someone else's eyes. (Ben Erickson, A Parting Gift, posted 4/25/09)

...it is possible to recover from catastrophic loss without ever getting over it. (John Burnham Schwartz, The Commoner, (posted 4/21/09)

Books can pluck you out of your everyday experiences and carry you somewhere far away. (Ben Erickson, A Parting Gift, posted 4/16/09)

Find your place. Be happy with what you have. Treat everyone well. Live a good life. It isn't about material things; it's about love. And you can never anticipate love. (Vicki Myron, Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, posted 4/12/09)

We're basically looking for evidence in support of conclusions we've already arrived at regarding the world and our place in it. (Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs, posted 4/9/09)

This was perhaps what it was like to mother anyone...far away or close. You could only try your best, then wait to see if what you sent was needed or even wanted. If it wasn't then you packed a new box, and tried again. (Laura Moriarty, The Rest of Her Life, posted 4/8/09)

...she had the sensation that she had been seen. And she had not even known she'd felt invisible. (Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, posted 4/6/09)

And I realized that books get their value from the way they coexist with other books a person owns, and that when they lose their context, they lose their meaning. (Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris, posted 4/3/09)


I can only hope that my children have learned to build their lives on a sturdier foundation, one fortified by self-reliance, hard work, independent thinking, personal responsibility and pride in accomplishment. (Leslie Bennetts, The Secret Currency of Love, posted 4/2/09)

...her love of history, books and learning had become as much a part of her as her own soul. (Donna Russo Morin, The Courtier's Secret, posted 3/26/09)

Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. (Alan Brennert, Moloka'i, posted 3/19/09)

Everything that has happened to you has made you what you are today. There is no shame in that, only pride. (Elizabeth Inness-Brown, Burning Marguerite, posted 3/14/09)

Tell her happiness is just practice... If only she acted happy, she would be happy. (Nancy Horan, Loving Frank, posted 3/7/09)

Life was what happened when all the what-ifs didn't, when what you dreamed or hoped or - in this case - feared might come to pass passed by instead. (Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes, posted 2/26/09)

To be irresponsible, the one thing she was never allowed, never allowed herself to be, completely irresponsible. (Emily Listfield, Waiting to Surface, posted 2/25/09)

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, posted 2/24/09)

Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child. (Laura Lipman, What the Dead Know, posted 2/23/09)

2 comments:

Just Lisa said...

I read on SITS that you were new to SITS and new to blogging. Welcome! It's addictive!

Tina. said...

Thanks so much for your comment. That really made my day. I've never had anyone.. out of the blue... say that to me. It really inspires me so thank you so much.

Well, I think that it is AWESOME that you keep a notebook of quotes form books. I am a reader myself...but never have time to considering school. DO you have any suggestions of books for a 15 year alod girl ?

 

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