Sandy > Sandy's Quotes

“The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. (Death)”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . .

That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.”
― Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”
― Gertrude Stein

“I hear the word "tolerance" -- that some people are trying to teach people to be tolerant of gays. I'm not satisfied with that word. I am gay, and I am not seeking to be "tolerated." One tolerates a toothache, rush-hour traffic, an annoying neighbor with a cluttered yard. I am not a negative to be tolerated.”
― Chely Wright, Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― 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

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

“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Once the god-squaddie supreme, she was now possessed of the zeal of the apostate and came on like an atheistic stormtrooper.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation. ”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“That day was turning out to be longer than The Brothers Karamazov.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Not evil. Moronic, which isn't quite the same thing. Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moron or a lout, however, doesn't stop to think or reason. He acts on instinct, like a stable animal, convinced he's doing good, that he's always right, and sanctimoniously proud to go around f***ing up ... anyone he perceives to be different from himself, be it because of skin color, creed, language, nationality, or ... leisure habits. What the world needs is more thoroughly evil people and fewer borderline pigheads.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“Ordered by subject, by importance, ordered according to whether the book was penned by God or by one of God’s creatures, ordered alphabetically or by numbers or by the language in which the text is written, every library translates the chaos of discovery and creation into a structured system of hierarchies or a rampage of free associations.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.”
― Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived