Shadows & Light

What follows are various quotes I like from books I've recently read.

"Not all knowledge comes from the mind. Your body, your heart, your intuition. Sometimes memories even have minds of their own."

― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

"She turned [the heart] around and around, looking for chinks and crevices. There was a memory here. A beloved person. A loss. A flood of hope. A pit of despair. How many feelings can one heart hold? She looked at her grandmother. At her mother. At the man protecting his family. Infinite, Luna thought. The way the universe is infinite. It is light and dark and endless motion; it is space and time, and space within space, and time within time. And she knew: there is no limit to what the heart can carry."

― Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon

"Her self-respect had suffered a head-on collision with love, a clash that generally only ends one way. Love does not fight fair. In that moment her pride, the gut knowledge that she was right, even her sense of who she was, meant nothing, faced as she was with the prospect of being unloved."

― Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree

"I sort of like the idea of someone keeping a dossier on me. It's like outsourcing your own diary. Let someone else do the writing while I focus on the living. Genius, right?"

― J.C. Carleson, Placebo Junkies

"The only certainty of being truly alone with your thoughts is that whatever you're thinking is probably wrong."

"I'm not ready for any more reality at the moment. I'm already at a toxic saturation level; I'm this close to overdosing on the truth."

"We all have our fantasy lives, don't we? There's a fine line between delusional and ambitious, it occurs to me. We're all just hoping for a better reality."

― J.C. Carleson, Placebo Junkies

"'No matter how old we get, we somehow can never convince ourselves that whatever trial we're in the middle of is only temporary. No matter how may trials we've had in the past, and no matter how well we remember that they eventually were there no longer, we're sure that this one, this one right now, is a permanent state of affairs. But it's not. By nature humans are temporary beings.'

'You're saying I just have to ride it out until it goes away.'

'Not at all, my dear. I'm saying you have to strive for a solution and trust that eventually there will be one.'"

― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

"If left unused, conversations can grow rusty over time. The opinions and feelings we've expressed before, when left to their own devices, can grow sluggish and curmudgeonly. They become too used to sitting alone and unconsidered, and if you ask them to move, their joints can ache, or parts of them can crumble away. Sometimes you can return to an opinion you've not visited in years and find it's died and rotted away without you even noticing. Sometimes a feeling we assume we'll have for ever can abandon us and leave a gap we don't notice until we suddenly feel the need to call upon that feeling."

― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

"Robert was silent for a moment, watching his daughter try to coax the ladybird off the rug and onto her finger. He wanted to warn the bug away; the finger of a five-year-old girl is a safe place for no one."

― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

"There's nothing like forgiveness for making a person feel guilty. There's nothing like understanding for making a person feel undeserving. Because if someone is willing to forgive a weakness, they deserve better than to have put up with it."

― Janina Matthewson, Of Things Gone Astray

"Family isn't blood, necessarily; it's a thousand little choices we make every day. We choose to trust each other and forgive each other and go to the pasta place for dinner even though some of us would rather eat sushi."

― Rebecca Podos, The Mystery of Hollow Places