Deborah > Deborah's Quotes

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“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

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“I’m so lucky to have you, Leni,” Mama said, trying to organize her cards with one hand.

“We’re a team,” Leni said. “Peas in a pod.”

“Two of a kind.”

Words they said all the time to each other; words that felt a little hollow now. Maybe even sad.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Inside was a library unlike any Leni had ever seen. Row upon row of wooden desks, decorated with green banker's lamps, were positioned beneath an arched ceiling. Gothic chandeliers hung above the desks. And the books! She'd never seen so many. They whispered to her of unexplored worlds and unmet friends and she realized that she wasn't alone in this new world. Her friends were here, spine out, waiting for her as they always had.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“If we were perfect, the light he shines on us would just bounce right off. But the wrinkles, they catch the light. And the cracks, that’s how the light gets inside us. When I pray, Odie, I never pray for perfection. I pray for forgiveness, because it’s the one prayer I know will always be answered.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

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

“You are not a creature of grief. You are not a congregation of wounds. You are not the sum of your losses. Your skin is not your scars. Your life is yours, and it can be new and wondrous. Remember that.”
― Jeff Zentner, In the Wild Light

“I hate this Christmas song,” Lyle said at last, turning off the radio. “You don’t like John Lennon?” Peg asked, trying to stifle a small laugh. “It’s just that, only John Lennon could write a Christmas song that made you feel like a fool for ever liking Christmas at all. Paul McCartney would never do that. Or George or Ringo, for that matter.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“He cared not for politics; he’d lived long enough to watch every politician he once admired become an abject disappointment, if not a liar.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“Part of being a parent is loving your child more than they'll ever love you.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“Part of being a parent is loving your child more than they'll ever love you.... It's true. You'll see someday. You'll see.
The heaviest thing in the world is the coffin that carries the weight of a little child, for no adult who has ever borne that burden will ever forget it. To bury a child is a tragedy many parents never overcome.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“How fragile the world seemed on Christmas Eve, how delicate. As if everyone in the church wobbled on the brink between ecstatic happiness on one side, and the tragic reminder of the departed, on the other; it was a time when ghosts swirled and whispered.”
― Nicklolas Butler

“Silent Night" in a darkened country chapel was, to Lyle, more powerful than any atomic bomb. He was incapable of singing it without feeling his eyes go misty, without feeling that his voice was but one link in a chain of voices connected over the generations and centuries, that line we sometimes call family. Or memory itself.”
― Nicklolas Butler

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

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

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves