Samantha Dalton > Samantha's Quotes

“I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It’s his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don't worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, 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.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Everything ends, and Everything matters.

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got…and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living weren't already complicated enough.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
― 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

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

“We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“Two thousand million people in the world, and the one who has to decide their fate is is the only one who's always hidden from me.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“But that one single soul was emperor of the universe, no less than each of us.”
― Michael Frayn, Copenhagen

“Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

“Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way.”
― Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray

“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.”
― James Frey, Bright Shiny Morning

“And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that’s fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned – to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control. Even in this late drama, to try to control is to go mad. And so you do your best to let it all go.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“You could not be more correct. It does matter. All of it.”
― Ron Currie Jr., Everything Matters!

“This wasn't the person he'd thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he'd been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom