The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Which did I think would make the best companion for a man’s nether years, Miss X or Miss Y? I told him that if one had to ask which, it generally meant neither. —Mary Ann Shaffer
City of Thieves
Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She’s beautiful; when you’re with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening […]
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Are two types of jokes. One sort goes on being funny forever. Other sort is funny once. Second time it’s dull. This joke is second sort. Use it once, you’re a wit. Use twice, you’re a halfwit. —Robert Heinlein
Birdy
I don’t know how long I was dreaming the dream before I began to know. It’s hard to know you’re dreaming unless you catch yourself doing it. —William Wharton
Empire Falls
One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect. —Richard Russo
Bring Up the Bodies
You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws. —Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall
Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. —Hilary Mantel
Stoner
In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. —John Williams
Johnny Got His Gun
If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us. They will not be us the guys who grow wheat and turn it into food the guys who make clothes and paper and houses […]
This is Where I Leave you
The thing about people who work in finance is that they consider their job infinitely more important than anything or anyone, and so it’s perfectly legitimate to tell everyone else to fuck off because they have a conference call with Dubai. Billions of dollars are involved, so things like a kid’s birthday or a wife’s […]
Jitterbug Perfume
To physically overcome death—is that not the goal?—we must think unthinkable thoughts and ask unanswerable questions. Yet we must not lose ourselves in abstract vapors of philosophy. Death has his concrete allies, we must enlist ours. Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be […]
The Blind Assassin
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. —Margaret Atwood
History of the Rain
…poets are different to you and me. Poets do not escape into other worlds, they go deeper into this one. —Niall Williams
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. —Richard Flanagan
All the Light We Cannot See
What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, […]
The Bone Clocks
Art feasts upon its maker. —David Mitchell
Straight Man
Truly grateful people don’t make lists of things to be grateful for, any more than happy people make lists of things to be happy about. Happy people have enough to do just being happy. —Richard Russo
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk. —Karen Joy Fowler
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
He called me Paulie. “Paulie, run and get me a beer from the fridge.” “Paulie, stay awake, now, it’s the sixth inning, Paulie, you gotta watch the game and tell me what happens.” “We lost, Paulie, it’s another loss, goddamn it, that’s how it is with them losing fucks, they lose on you, the fuckers.” […]
Americanah
You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two […]
