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“women lose control when they’re afraid and that men lose control when they’re in love.”
― Vu Tran, Dragonfish

“The only true way to forgive someone, it seems to me, is to forget what they have done to you and, in turn, forget them. Whether that is possible is another question.”
― Vu Tran, Dragonfish

“Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma. For”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“The personality and the ego scream, while the soul whispers.”
― Elmore Leonard, Riding the Rap

“You wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, “Something’s not right. Something’s off somewhere; what is it?” And then you remember that it’s your child—whichever one is unhappy. She”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The shelf held nothing of value and it held everything of value. It was the past they’d both endured and escaped. It was despair and hope. It was life and death.”
― Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, The Nest

“In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
― john steinbeck

“In war, death is blind. It never stops to look at its victims.”
― Khaled Khalifa, Death Is Hard Work

“the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Unlike when a young person commits suicide, which could never be anything but a mistake.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“people have said that were it not for suicide they could not go on.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“War is not an aberration, best forgotten as quickly as possible.”
― Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us

“So while we formally mourn the dead from our past wars once a year, we increasingly see war as something that happens when peace—the normal state of affairs—breaks down. At the same time we can indulge a fascination with great military heroes and their battles of the past; we admire stories of courage and daring exploits in war; the shelves of bookshops and libraries are packed with military histories; and movie and television producers know that war is always a popular subject. The public never seems to tire of Napoleon and his campaigns, Dunkirk, D-Day or the fantasies of Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. We enjoy them in part because they are at a safe distance; we are confident that we ourselves will never have to take part in war. The result is that we do not take war as seriously as it deserves. We may prefer to avert our eyes from what is so often a grim and depressing subject, but we should not.”
― Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us

“history has been recorded by the victors, not the defeated or disenfranchised.”
― Simon Van Booy, Night Came with Many Stars

“drunk guys who are only happy when they’re sad.”
― Jaime Cortez, Gordo: Stories

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land