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“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“They say that love conquers all, but that's a lie. Love fucks up all the time. I've seen firsthand how much love cannot conquer. Love is an asshole.”
― Jana Aston, Good Time

“Nora.” He just barely smiles. “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“That’s the thing about women. There’s no good way to be one. Wear your emotions on your sleeve and you’re hysterical. Keep them tucked away where your boyfriend doesn’t have to tend to them and you’re a heartless bitch.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like … like everything will be okay.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Those were the endings I found solace in. The ones that said, Yes, you have lost something, but maybe, someday, you’ll find something too.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Life in New York was like being in a giant bookstore: all these trillions of paths and possibilities drawing dreamers into the city's beating heart, saying, I make no promises but I offer many doors.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“I still feel like a city person, through and through, but maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“A reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Because nothing—not the beautiful and not the terrible—lasts.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“So all I can do is cry with her. Somehow, it never occurred to me that this was an option: that two people, in the same hug, could both be allowed to fall apart. That maybe it’s neither of our jobs to keep a steel spine. That we can both survive this pain without the other shouldering it.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty - unless she is wed to something more meaningful - is always superficial.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,” he said. “You are like children. Afraid of the dark.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“You don't need to have it all. You only need to figure out how much is enough.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“She had known from a young age that everyone had darkness inside-some just controlled it better than others. Very few people believed that they were bad, and this was the scariest part. Human nature could be so hideous, but it persisted in this ugliness by insisting it was good.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

“But Saffy knew about catastrophe. It was arbitrary. A thing descended from nowhere, pointed a bony finger, and smirked. As if to say: I choose you.”
― Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution