"Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are."
— Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)

"I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death.
He smashed that one first.
My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven.
He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands.
'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand.
My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him.
My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived.
'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him.
Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult.

'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

~pgs 46-47 and 247"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see? And the moment's over. You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.... The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air"
— Carolyn Parkhurst (The Dogs of Babel)

"Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink."
— George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four)

"Just because something is unspoken doesn't mean that it disappears."
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. but the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, HAlley, weren't yet in place. Scarlett's vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting.
pg 23
........................................
As I lost sight of him, I thought of that sketched black outline, the colors inside just beginning to get filled in. The girl I'd been, the girl I was. I told myself the chances had come fast and furious these last few months, and one more wasn't that big of a deal. But each time I did I thought of Scarlett, always Scarlett, and that new color, that particular shade, which I wasn't ready to take on just yet. pgs 182-183"
— Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You)

"As I watched my family sip champagne, I thought about how their lives trailed backward and forward from my death and then, I saw, as Samuel took the daring step of kissing Lindsey in a room full of family, became borne aloft away from it.
These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections- sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent- that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.
My father looked at the daughter who was standing there in front of him. The shadow daughter was gone.
~pgs 320-321
The Lovely Bones emerging"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"I knew that my brother would still be a part of this world no matter what happened next. I felt my love for him so deeply that my blood seemed to flow down the street to him. My blood sang out my prayer for Luis even while he was still living in our world."
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."
— Elie Wiesel

"My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book.
~Susie's grandmother, Lynn
pgs 315-316"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"'My point is, there are a lot of people in the world. No one ever sees everything the same way you do; it just doesn't happen. So when yo ufind one person who gets a couple of things, especially if they're important ones... you might as well hod on to them. You know?'
~Oliva, pg 312"
— Sarah Dessen (Lock and Key)

"Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Just that winter she had found herself saying to a young woman who worked with her at the tasting bar on Saturdays that between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. 'That doesn't mean the weaker one doesn't love the stronger,' she'd pleaded. The girl looked at her blankly. But for my mother what mattered was that as she spoke, she had suddenly identified herself as the weaker one. This revelation sent her reeling. What had she thought all those years but the opposite?
She pulled her chair as close to his head as she could and laid her face on the edge of his pillow to watch him breathing, to see the flutter of the eye beneath his eyelid when he dreamed. How could it be that you could love someone so far from home? She had put billboards and roads in between them, throwing roadblocks behind her and ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that that would make him disappear? erase their life and children?
It was so simple, as she watched him, as his regular breathing calmed her, that she did not even see it happening at first. She began to think of the rooms in our house and the hours that she had worked so hard to forget spent inside of them. Like fruit put up in jars and forgotten about, the sweetness seemed even more distilled as she returned. There on that shelf were all the dates and silliness of thier early love, the braid that began to form of their dreams, the solid root of a burgeoning family. The first solid evidence of it all. Me.
~love- there is a sarah dessen quote about needing one parent to be strong, one weak
pg 277"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
And as I walked back to give Takumi's note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

~Miles/Pudge on Alaska's death, pg 218"
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"I couldn't help but think, as I watched him, of the barrels of toxic fluids that had accrued behind Hal's bike shop where the scrub lining the railroad tracks had offered local companies enough cover to dump a stray contaner or two. Everything had been sealed up, but things were beginning to leak out. I had come to both pity and respect Len in the years since my mother left. He followed the physical to try to understand things that were impossible to comphrehend. In that, I could see, he was like me.
~Susie and Len
pg 273"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others."
— Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)

"There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment."
— Sarah Dessen (The Truth About Forever)

"At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow in between and count them among the things that sustained him. The young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long for her now too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that went straight to both Len's and my own heart. Elderly women, wobbling with walkers, who insisted on dyeing their hair unnatural versions of the colors they had in youth. Middle-aged single mothers racing around in grocery stores while their children pulled bags of candy off the shelves. When I saw them, I took count. Living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded- those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers, children raped by their fathers- and I would wish to intervene somehow.
Len saw these wounded women all the time. They were regulars at the station, but even when he went somewhere outside his jurisdiction he could sense them when they came near. The wife in that bait-'n'-tackle shop had no bruises on her face but cowered like a dog and spoke in apologetic whispers. The girl he saw walk the road each time he went upstate to visit his sisters. As the years passed she'd grown leaner, the fat from her cheeks had drained, and sorrow had loaded her eyes in a way that made them hang heavy and hopeless inside her mallowed skin. When she was not there it worried him. When she was there it both depressed and revived him.
~Len Fenerman on stepping back/letting go/giving up
pgs 271-272"
— Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)

"I am haunted by humans."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"He knew I'd seen everything in that alley, that I'd stood there and done nothing. He knew that I'd betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time. "
— Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)

"I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there."
— Oscar Wilde

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"(page 327) Sometimes we seek that which we are not yet ready to find."
— Libba Bray (Rebel Angels)

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

"I would not begin to understand until I was a very old woman, and even then they would still be a mystery."
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

"A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love,
often deciphered by children"
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Oh God! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
— Emily Brontë

"So this is what I will do. I will gather together my past and look. I will see a thing that has already happened. the pain that cut my spirit loose. I will hold that pain in my hand until it becomes hard and shiny, more clear. And then my fierceness can come back, my golden side, my black side. I will use this sharp pain to penetrate my daughter's tough skin and cut her tiger spirit loose. She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and giver her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter."
— Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)

"My sisters and I stand, arms around each other, laughind and wiping the tears from each others eyes. The flash of the Polaroid goes off and my family hands me the snapshot. My sisters and I watch quietly together, eager to see what develops.
Ghe grey-greensurface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once. And although we don't speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother. Her same eyes, her same mouth, open in suprise to see, her long-cherished wish."
— Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)

"In riding a horse, we borrow freedom"
— Helen Thompson

"I thought of the bowl of water my mother taught me to look into. It was true, everything a person ever needed to know was right there in a single bowl small enough to fit in the palm of one hand."
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

"'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.'"
— Margery Williams Bianco (The Velveteen Rabbit)

"[sic]Keep looking up, Mama used to tell me. There's nothing on the ground but your feet."
— Lee Martin (The Bright Forever: A Novel)

"High school sucks. People who say those were the best years of your life - those people are liars... Who wants the best years of their life to be in *high school*? High school is something *everybody* should be ready to lose."
— Meg Cabot (Forever Princess)

"His soul sat up. It met me. Those kinds of souls always do - the best ones. The ones who rise up and say "I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come." Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."
— Emily Brontë

"Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby."
— Langston Hughes

"High School is like a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it's just plain useless."
— John Mayer

"The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened."
— John F. Kennedy

"I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"High school isn't a very important place. When you're going you think it's a big deal, but when it's over nobody really thinks it was great unless they're beered up."
— Stephen King

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."
— John F. Kennedy

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
— Kurt Vonnegut

"All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you're lucky, there's someone close enough by to shoulder the rest."
— Sarah Dessen- Just Listen

"It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came."
— Sarah Dessen (Keeping The Moon)

"Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world."
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

" 'It is how it has always been. We will accept the legacy of our ancestors,' Asha says, smiling, and in her smile I do not see warmth or wisdom; I see fear.
'You're afraid of losing your hold on them,' I say coolly.
'I? I have no power.'
'Don't you? If you keep them from the magic, they will never know what their lives could be.'
'They will remain protected,' Asha insists.
'No,' I say. 'Only untested'
-page 569"
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)