"Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?"
— Amy Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses)

"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
-- Margaret Lea"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"So Sonia was not my only or even my first best friend. She was the last. It wasn t that I hadn t made friends since just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn t grant you an exclusive isn t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn t imagine ever living that moment again when you say with a shy and hopeful pride You re my best friend. The other person says it back and there you have chosen each other out of everyone else in the world. "
— Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me: A Novel)

"A happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story."
— Leah Stewart

"Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers."
— Mary Ann Shaffer (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society)

"He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime."
— Kelly Corrigan (The Middle Place)

"But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it's how you spend your time on the way down that counts."
— Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: A Novel)

"It had not occured to me to mourn losing those things until now. I had done each of those things, somewhere along the way, for a last time - without realizing it was the last time. And even after I knew that I was no longer a child, somehow I'd assumed those things could have come back to me. Or that I could have gone back to them. But watching the movies on this day, I became aware of infinite losses."
— Katherine Center (Everyone Is Beautiful: A Novel)

"Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them. You could stop at the corner to buy a newspaper when a drunk driver veered onto the sidewalk. You could feed your child an E. coli-tainted hamburger. You could turn your head for a second while one darted out into the street. The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children's lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours wold be, too."
— Katherine Center (Everyone Is Beautiful: A Novel)

"After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so."
— Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)

""We are all just ingredients, Tom What matters is the grace with which you cook the meal""
— Erica Bauermeister (The School of Essential Ingredients)

"Each person's heart breaks in it's own way. Every cure will be different, but there are some things we all need. Before anything else, we need to feel safe."
— Erica Bauermeister (The School of Essential Ingredients)

"When she realized that there are many kinds of love and not all of them are obvious. That some wait like presents in the back of the closet until you are able to open them."
— Erica Bauermeister (The School of Essential Ingredients)

"Really, when I look back on it, I did exactly what I had set out to do. I changed my life. I woke myself up. I rediscovered passions of every variety. I forced myself to take a little time. I found a way to bring some of who I used to be into who I was."
— Katherine Center (Everyone Is Beautiful: A Novel)

"The romance of your child's childhood may be the last romance you can give up."
— Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)

"She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: 'Where's Loo-ka?', just like Audrey Hepburn saying, 'Take the pic-ture,' in Funny Face."
— Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)

"...you have taken part in the only really majestic choice we get to make in life, which is to continue it."
— Adam Gopnik (Paris to the Moon)

"Being around her, he found even every day experiences were deeper, nuanced. Satisfaction and awareness slipped in between the layers of life like love notes hidden in the pages of a textbook."
— Erica Bauermeister (The School of Essential Ingredients)

"It doesn't matter what people tell you. It doesn't matter what they might say. Sometimes you have to leave home. Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction."
— Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

"I hum some secret place into being, thinking of this other me, the one that only I can see, a girl called She, who is not We, a girl who I will never be."
— Lori Lansens (The Girls)

"She liked being reminded of butterflies. She remembered being six or seven and crying over the fates of the butterflies in her yard after learning that they lived for only a few days. Her mother had comforted her and told her not to be sad for the butterflies, that just because their lives were short didn't mean they were tragic. Watching them flying in the warm sun among the daisies in their garden, her mother had said to her, see, they have a beautiful life. Alice liked remembering that."
— Lisa Genova (Still Alice)

"There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for sure certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can."
— Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

"Maybe we're all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they're extraordinary."
— Lisa See (Shanghai Girls)

"I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate."
— Lisa See (Shanghai Girls)

"I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. "
— Chris Cleave (Little Bee)

"Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

""Better that we leave the paint behind," Hans told her, "than ever forget the music."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

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

"That is surely the truth, at least for now. But perhaps you have not noticed: the truth is forever changing.”"
— Kate DiCamillo (The Magician's Elephant)

"Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens."
— Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth)

"Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life. "
— Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth)

"She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked."
— Ian McEwan

"That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves"
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

""To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to."
"
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

""Well, it's simple to love someone," she said. "But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud.""
— Rebecca Stead (When You Reach Me)

"This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!"
— Julia Child (My Life in France)

"Buttercup's mother hesitated, then put her stew spoon down. (This was after stew, but so is everything. When the first man first clambered from the slime and made his first home on land, what he had for supper that first night was stew.)"
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Buttercup's mother whirled on him. 'Did you forget to pay your taxes?'(This was after taxes. But everything is after taxes. Taxes were here even before stew.)"
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Do I love you? My God, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

""I could give you my word as a Spaniard," Inigo said.
"No good," the man in black replied. "I've known too many Spaniards.""
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Sonny, don't you tell me what's worthwhile--true love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. Everybody knows that."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam."
— William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

"Lucrezia has never seen her own face, and cannot know its expressions--how, at that moment, her smile was an explosion."
— Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories)

"Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?"
— Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories)

"Then he tells his son, "This feels like that breath you take after coming up from a long swim underwater. The most gorgeous feeling, that sip of air you feared you'd never have again." He looks at Compass, and touches his cheek, gently. "Surfacing," he says."
— Lauren Groff (Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories)