Collecting Favorite Lines
Certain words make me want to pause in my reading——dog-ear a page, underline with a mechanical pencil. I’ll keep a digital record of those lines here. Collection updated as I read.
“Her second consolation was the recurring thought that she might always give up college if she chose, and simply stay at home with her mother and father; this prospect was so horrible that Natalie found herself, when she thought confidently about it, almost enjoying her fear of going away.” (page 4)
——Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
“But that rush? That rush from doing something that could have killed him if he’d just been unfortunate that day? It never left him. . . . He knew, he always had, that life was about timing and death was always lurking and all of life was hide-and-seek. Why not enjoy the game?” (page 16)
——Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde
“We’ll give up our lives, we’ll bite hot bullets with our ribcages to protect them. We accept bribes with our chests, we auction our pity without flinching, we hawk our consciences in broad daylight. Here, morality has never been the issue. Every city demands its own sacrifices.” (page 30)
——Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde
“After all, when Toju asked, ‘What if I leave?’ Agbon had responded with the crushing indifference: ‘Then you leave.’
‘You won’t cry? That’s it?’
‘I probably would, but the universe is expansive, you know? We never run out of possible loves. Everything is about choice, then. I’m here now, you’re here now. That is good. That’s enough.’” (page 103)
——Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde
“What I will also say is that women are magicians. I don’t mean magic like the kind you were warned to avoid. I mean magic as in spinning story as lifeline, as in turning a wound into a star, as in holding an apocalypse in your core and smiling believably. . . . Magic as in, watch, I can get so pretty you’ll mistake me for alive. Every day, it’s happening. We watch rolling miracles so often we forget to thank our stars.” (page 129–130)
——Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde
“Take it from me: hard-walled as it is, there are cracks in power that can be crawled through. And if there’s anything vagabonds know how to do, it’s to live in the cracks; to grow tall and thick as unfellable trees.” (page 156)
——Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde
“But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.” (page 35)
——Devil House by John Darnielle
“Niamh wondered sometimes if this was her future too. Fiercely single; just batty enough to deter nosy strangers; surrounded by animals and a handful of cherished friends. She could think of far worse fates.” (page 96)
——Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson
“We are witches. We’re meant to be better than mundanes. We know, intimately, the infinity of nature, its bottomless variation and wonder, and you can’t fucking conceive of [character] as a girl? You can turn fire into ice, but you can’t believe a boy could become a girl? We are not of our bodies; they change, die and rot. Our magic, the thing that defines us has no sex, and I think you know it.” (page 236 - some character names removed to avoid spoilers)
——Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson
“As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.” (page 36)
——Swing Time by Zadie Smith
“‘Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.’
She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her cheeks.
‘That’s very true,’ she said. ‘Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?’” (page 395)
——Swing Time by Zadie Smith
“People told us that comparison was the thief of joy. But the real culprit was competition. They never talked about what happened when we wanted the same thing.” (page 110)
——The Girls Are All So Nice Here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
“I don’t know if it’s disgusting or impressive that girls can do that for each other. That we can achieve that level of deceit in the name of sisterhood.” (page 242)
——The Girls Are All So Nice Here by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn
“That was part of being female, wasn’t it? Intuiting, each time, what men didn’t want to know.” (page 111)
——Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
