"What I got was not so much gifts and whishes come trues but a feeling of peace. I got peace itself, actually. And when you have peace, you can be strong; and when you are strong, you can get through what you have to get through, and not with exhaustion and frown marks and slumped shoulders but with relative happiness, and humor, and sometimes even gaiety. "
— Peggy Noonan

"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.
--Eddie's Wife"
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala)

"Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners."
— Mitch Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala)

"You're going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it's always their actions you should judge them by. It's actions, not words, that matter."
— Nicholas Sparks

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."
— Paulo Coelho

"Don't think about what you've left behind" The alchemist said to the boy as they began to ride across the sands of the desert. "If what one finds is made of pure matter, it will never spoil. And one can always come back. If what you had found was only a moment of light, like the explosion of a star, you would find nothing on your return."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times."
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)

"He had not opened his eyes in the moment. Her touch had released some tiny increment of the poison bound up in him that would, days to come, ripen into sorrow. And by the time he thought all this he could no longer tell if her caress had truly happened or whether he'd manufactured it out of necessity."
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

""After dinner, I become afraid despite myself. I know I should be joyous, for this reunion is the proof that love can still be ours, but I know the bell has tolled this evening. The sun has long since set and the thief is about to come, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. So I stare at her and wait and live a lifetime in these last remaining moments." "
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"You can't be brave if you're not scarred."
— Julia Alvarez (Before We Were Free)

"Maybe the thing to do after you roll the dice-and lose-is simply pick them up and roll them again."
— Emily Giffin (Something Borrowed)

"After all, as Chucha herself would say, what good is it to escape captivity only to be imprisoned in you own misery. "
— Julia Alvarez (Before We Were Free)

"Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by."
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

"You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything...it was not a morbid thought, just the world as it existed. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn't."
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

"Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"
She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate
"
— Isabel Allende (Daughter of Fortune)

"I want my children to be free, no matter what. Promise me you'll spread your wingsand fly."
— Julia Alvarez

"I always got the feeling with John Paul that if he could have narrowed down the people he met and blessed those he loved the most, they would not be cardinals, princes, or congressman, but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children, especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way the love of God seems more immediately available to them. Everyone else gets themselves tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, all the great distractions, but the modest and unwell are so often unusually open to this message: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and be happy"
— Peggy Noonan

"Same as what they taught you as a lifeguard- you have to save yourself before you can save anyone else. "
— Philipp Meyer (American Rust: A Novel)

"That was the thing about Simon and all the others, so pleasant on the surface, always knowing what to say, but underneath there was something else, there were not the kind to sacrifice themselves- they've all been taught they have too much to lose. "
— Philipp Meyer (American Rust: A Novel)

"But even thinking that brought on an incredible isolation, a suspicion she'd always had, she didn't belong anywhere, she was going to outlive everyone she knew. She was going to be alone, the same as her mother. "
— Philipp Meyer (American Rust: A Novel)

"But of course they hadn't done anything. They'd all be born to the right parents, in the right neighborhoods, they went to the right schools, had all the right social instructions, taken all the right tests. There was simply not a chance they would fail. They'd worked hard but always with the expectation they would get what they wanted- the world had never shown them anything different. Very few of them had earned their places. Everyone admtted how spoiled they were but underneadth, there was always the presumption that they deserved it.
Of course, she hadn't said word. She wished she had but she hadn't. It was easy now to look back and think these things, but at the time she'd wanted to fit in and go along with Bunny and think yes I deseve this happy life I'm living. "
— Philipp Meyer (American Rust: A Novel)

"I now know that God has a plan for each of us. The thing is to find out what it is.” How? Through prayer, through keeping your mind open, and trough the circumstances of daily life and the people you meet."
— Peggy Noonan

"I find this to be true of my spiritual life, and maybe it applies to yours as well: I think about things more than I do them; I ponder what seems their goodness more than I perform them. As if my thought alone were enough. But a thought alone isn’t quite enough; it’s an impulse and not a commitment, a passing thing that doesn’t take root unless you plant it and make it grow. "
— Peggy Noonan

"Novak was saying that the pope’s message was in part: You are not nothing; you are a great deal. God made you in his image, and he calls you to be like him. And so you must walk forward in to the world each day with confidence and humility. This reminded me of what a woman in Bible study said once. “Walk with pride, for you are the daughter of a king."
— Peggy Noonan

"You shouldn’t hold on to things, to neuroses. People-artists-think they have to hold on to their neuroses, their pains, or they won’t be a good actor anymore or a good artist. That’s the Liar. The Liar tells you that. You hold on to them, you’ll just wind up a lonely person. People become lonely with them, and the fame has moved on to someone else. You have to heal, you have to maintain relationships... That’s why we say the Our Father: ‘Deliver us from evil'"
— Peggy Noonan

"The Pope replied, “of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves.” He spoke of how Saint Peter himself, the rock on which Christ had built his church, had told Christ to leave him, “for I am a sinful man.” Peter was a sinful man. We all are, including popes. We are imperfect and “our hearts are anxious.” But we cannot and should not let the fact of our unworthiness and flaws and failures build that wall with a kind of inverted pride that says, Oh, I’m so unworthy, and I’d know how unworthy I am better than you would."
— Peggy Noonan

"I have one final hope, If I get double sixes, maybe he will change his mind, come back to me. As if to cast a magic spell, I blow on the dice just as Dex did...Just as it happened with our first roll, one die lands before its mate. On a six! I hold my breath. For a brief second, I see a mess of dots, and think I have boxcars again. I kneel, staring at the second die.

It is onle a five.

I have rolled an eleven, It is as if someone is mocking me, saying, Close, but no dice."
— Emily Giffin

"I know what I have to say. I think of Hillary's advice, how she has been telling me to say something all along. But I am not doing this for her. This is for me. I formulate the sentences, words that have been ringing in my head all summer.

"I want to be with you, Dex" I say steadily. "Cancel the wedding. Be with me."

There it is. After two months of waiting, a lifetime of passivity, everything is on the line. I feel relieved and liberated and changed. I am a woman who expects happiness. I deserve happiness. Surely he will make me happy.

Dex inhales, on the verge of responding.

"Don't," I say, shaking my head. "Please don't talk to me agian unless it's to tell me that the wedding is off. We have nothing more to discuss until then."

Our eyes lock. Neither of us blinks for a minute or more. And then, for the first time, I beat Dex in a staring contest. "
— Emily Giffin (Something Borrowed)

"Noah: "You wanna dance with me?"
Allie: "Sure. Now?"
Noah: "Mmm Hmm"
Allie: "You're not supposed to dance in the street."
Noah: "You are supposed to dance in the street."
Allie: "Yeah, but we don't have any music."
Noah: "Well, we'll make some... Bum bum bum bum bum bum..."
Allie: "You're a terrible singer."
Noah: "I know."
Allie: "And I like this song.""
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

"On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him."
— Robert Alexander (The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar)

"They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake)

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook)

""You see, my love. As you've always said, after the rain-"
"Sun."
"After the darkness-"
"Light."
"And after the illness-"
"Health."
"Exactly," said the Tsar. "We mustn't give up faith."

"
— Robert Alexander (The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar)

"I grimaced at him, resisting the impulse to stick my tongue out at him like a five year old."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

"But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."
— Tim O'Brien

"Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories ar for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, expect there's still this sound you can't hear."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"If I could dream at all it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it."
— Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)