Line By Line: Markus Zuzak, The Book Thief

“He stood a few meters from the step and spoke with great conviction, great joy.
"Alles ist Scheisse," he announced.
All is shit.”

“The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. That basement was not a washroom. They were not sent there for a shower. For those people, life was still achievable.”

“Papa sat with me tonight. He brought the accordion down and sat close to where Max used to sit. I often look at his fingers and face when he plays. The accordion breathes. There are lines on his cheeks. They look drawn on, and for some reason, when I see them, I want to cry. It is not for any sadness or pride. I just like the way they move and change. Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.”

“Clearly," said Arthur,"you're an idiot- but you're our kind of idiot. Come on.”

Line by Line: Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

“She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.”

“The problem, like most problems in life, probably had to do with his footwork.”

“It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like their first meeting on the steps of the gym, when he’d hardly so much as glanced at her. With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose; she felt watched, observed, like the prize inhabitant of a zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back, to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her.”

“The doctor said a ball hit me. But I don’t remember batting.” “You were in the dugout. Henry made a bad throw.” “Henry did? Really? Are you sure?” “Yes.” “Well, it’s always the ones you least suspect.” Owen let his eyes fall shut. “I don’t remember anything at all. Was I reading?” Affenlight nodded. “I warned you. It’s a dangerous pastime.”

“There are no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.”

Line by Line: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

"Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way...We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.”

"We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”

“We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.”

“In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”

Line By Line: Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”

“Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.”

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.”

“I felt my voice had fallen through and through me, and I couldn't summon it back to tell him or myself anything at all.”

“When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality."

Line By Line: Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal

“It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.”

“I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.”

“Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.” 

“There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.”

“We are bound by the secrets we share."

Line By Line: Jen Lancaster, Bitter is the New Black

“Although I get a lot of specialty services like wraps, scrubs, and
mustache removal, my favorite is the simple manicure/pedicure. They work on your hands and feet at the same time while you sit in a vibrating chair. I call it the sorority girls version of a threesome.”

“In other words? The bitch had it coming. And I am that bitch.”

“I yearn to be a woman of more depth, but I'm not so fond of the path I'd need to follow to get there.”

“Cost to clean deeply soiled rugs: $200.
Cost to replace shiny, black, stack-heeled, pilgrim-toed boots: $185.
Cost to fix every single delicious table and chair leg in the house: $490.
Life with two shelter dogs: fucking priceless.”

“No, it's not a 'corpse thing.' I feel I lack the emotional capacity to deal with those in mourning...”

Line By Line: Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin

“...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.”

“Everything people do that doesn’t work has to be somebody else’s fault. Next time you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly.”

“Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.”

“Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.”

“In a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.”

Line By Line: Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

"Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off."

"You cannot draw lines and compartments and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair."

"After all, our lives are but a sequence of events - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity that we call life."

"Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it."

My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying."

Line By Line: Cory Doctorow, For The Win

"The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it."

"It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions." 

"The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack."

"The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids."

Line By Line: Stephen King, The Green Mile

"A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are."

 "It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family."

"Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire." 

"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long." 

"Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation."

Line By Line: Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size."

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others."

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?"

Line By Line: Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

"We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor."

"We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. "

"Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days."

"almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on"

"We thanked each other. It was customary after every exchange. Our thanks were never disingenuous or ironic. We said thanks for getting this done so quickly, thanks for putting in so much effort. We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other."

Line By Line: Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You

"And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack."

"Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead."

"We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms."

"You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving."

When we reach the end of the page, and the last "amen" has been said, I'm sorry that' it's over. I could stay up here a while longer. And as we step down to make our way back to the pews, a quick survey of the sadness in my family's wet eyes tells me that I'm not the only one who feels that way. I don't feel any closer to my father than I did before, but for a moment there I was comforted, and that's more than I expected."

Line By Line: Yann Martel, Life of Pi

"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."

"I know what you want. You want a story that won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality."

"Time is an illusion that only makes us pant."

"Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"

Line By Line: Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

"Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

"Softly she laid her cheek on the pillow and stroked his hair. No tears flowed; it was a silent leave-taking."

"And now you know [life]'s not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

"The soul is the weariest part of the body."

"Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen."

Line By Line: Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

"Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are."

"Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over."

"Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are."

"Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead."

"Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks."

Line By Line: John Updike, Rabbit, Run

"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price."


"You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue." 


"...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him."


"Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers." 


"Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath." 

Line By Line: Sue Miller, While I Was Gone

"I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind." 

"It seems as we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done—and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet love me."

"For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies."

"And then I wondered: Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life?"

"This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing." 

Line By Line: Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep

"I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely."

"'The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen."

Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?"

"There are people we treat wrong and later we're prepared to treat other people right. Perhaps this sounds mercenary, but I feel grateful for these trial relationships, and I would like to think it all evens out - surely, unknowingly, I have served as practice for other people."

I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me."

Line By Line: Mary Roach, Stiff

"The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you."

"The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan."

"Death. It doesn't have to be boring."

"Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way."

"You do not question an author who appears on the title page as "T.V.N. Persaud, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc., F.R.C.Path. (Lond.), F.F.Path. (R.C.P.I.), F.A.C.O.G."