The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

★★★★★

"Maybe I'm dreaming you.  Maybe you're dreaming me; maybe we only exist in each other's dreams and every morning when we wake up we forget all about each other."

"Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life."

"There is only one page left to write on.  I will fill it with words of only one syllable.  I love.  I have loved.  I will love."

The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman

★★★★

" 'That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on the behalf of the young.  And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'  They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious."

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiComillo

★★★★

"Stories are light.  Light is precious in a world so dark.  Begin at the beginning.  Tell Gregory a story.  Make some light."

The Devil's Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

★★★★

"We all have such stories.  It is a brutal arithmetic.  But I - I am alive.  You are alive.  As long as we breathe, we can see and hear.  As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us."

"You are a name, not a number.  Never forget that name, whatever they tell you here."

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

★★★★

"Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same."

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

★★★★★

"We accept the love we think we deserve."

"So, I guess was are who we are for a lot of reasons.  And maybe we'll never know most of them.  But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.  We can still do thing.  And we can try to feel okay about them."

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire

★★★

"If the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men.  When we grow up, we realized it is far more common for men to turn into rats."

"If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it."

The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss

★★★

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

★★★★★

"...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.."

Feed by M. T. Anderson

★★★★

"We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products.  We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them one we discard them, one we throw them away."

"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

★★★★★

"That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book.  It's geometrically progressive - all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment."

Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind by Suzanne Fisher Staples

★★★★

"But beauty holds only part of a man, and that for just so long.  Keep some of yourself hidden.  You can lavish love and praise on him and work hard by his side...But the secret is keeping your innermost beauty, the secret of your soul, locked in your heart so that he must always reach out to you for it?"

Looking for Alaska by John Green

★★★★

"When adults say, 'Teenagers think they are invincible' with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are.  We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.  We think that we are invincible because we are.  We cannot be born, and we cannot die.  Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.  They forget that when they get old.  They get scared of losing and failing.  But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."

"Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there.' I don't know where there is, but I believe ti's somewhere, and I hope to find it."

Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock

★★★

"When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said."

Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli

★★★★

"When you own nothing, it's easy to let things go."

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

★★★★

"Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins."

Joey Pigza Loses Control by Jack Gantos

★★★

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

★★★★

"Ellen had said that her mother was afraid of the ocean, that it was too cold and too big.  The sky was, too, thought Annemarie.  The whole world was: too cold, too big.  And too cruel."

Ironman by Chris Crutcher

★★★

"You know, Bo, there is a feeling, in that instant following some life-changing tragedy, that you can actually step back over that silver of time and stop the horror from coming.  But that feeling is a lie, because in the tiniest microminisecond after any event occurs, it is as safe in history as Julius Caesar.  Data in the universal computer is backed up as it happens."

The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoniette by Carolly Erickson

★★

"I have never treasured any woman the way I treasure you now, this moment.  You are all I think of, all I want."

Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides

★★★★★

"Can you see me?  All of me?  Probably not.  No one ever really has."

Resistance by Anita Shreve

★★★★

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

★★★★

"He didn't know, of course.  Not really.  And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it.  For I knew what he meant.  We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dementions of grief is common to us all.  'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did."

The Pact by Jodi Picoult

★★★★

" 'I love you,' he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do.  When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own.  No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces."

Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

★★★★★

"Where we choose to be, where we choose to be - we have the power to determine that in our lives.  We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being."

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

★★★★★

"My parents danced together, her head on his chest.  Both had their eyes closed.  They seemed so perfectly content.  If you can find someone like that, someone whoyou can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you're lucky.  Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day.  The image of them gently swaying to the music is how I picture love in my mind, even after all these years."

"It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head.  Always.  All the time.  That story makes you what you are.  We build ourselves out of that story."

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

★★★★★

"With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant.  The fact that you kept it does not."

"Life is the most spectacular show on earth."

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

★★★★

"Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends."

"How could she tell him that we come to love those who save us?"

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

★★★★

"Someone told me much later that you always know the people who are going to make a difference in your life, from the very first time you set eyes on them, even if you do not like them at all.  And I had noticed him, as he had me.  God help us."

Fallen Skies by Philippa Gregory

★★★

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe

★★★

"She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls.  To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees an shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full."

Bhagavad-Gita/The Song of God by Anonymous

★★★

"It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

★★★

"That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged - to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony."

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

★★★★★

"Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this.  This is forever."

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

★★★★

"Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy to real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by Greg Martenson

★★★★

"Educate a boy, and you educate an individual.  Educate a girl, and you educate a community."

-African Proverb

"Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they've learned.  If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls."

The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan

★★★★

"Ghias, we must be careful not to teach the girls too much.  How will they ever find husbands if they are too learned?  The less they know, the less they will want of the outside world."

Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

★★★★

"And that is how, poised in the sky between our new life and our old one, the life we cannot imagine and the one we've already begun to forget.  I tell her a tale to make her heart strong, to graft her life onto."

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

★★★★

"Warp threads are thicker than the weft, and made of a coarser wool as well.  I think of them as like wives.  Their work is not obvious - all you can see are the ridges they make under the colorful weft threads.  But if they weren't there, there would be no tapestry.  Georges would unravel without me."

Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed by Patrick Woodhouse

★★★

" 'There must be someone to live through it all,' she wrote, 'and bear witness to the fact that God lived, even in these times.  And why should I not be that witness."

Escape to Les Vignes: A Childhood in Nazi-Occupied France by Anita Sharpe

★★★

"Each one of my family has a book they could write about their wartime experiences, as have all those who survived the war.  Many are now doing just that to give testimony to the experiences they had to endure simply because we were Jews."

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

★★★★★

"You can't stop time.  You can't capture light.  You can only turn your face up and let it rain down."

Meridon by Philippa Gregory

★★★★★

The Favored Child by Philippa Gregory

★★★★★

Wideacre by Philippa Gregory

★★★★★

"When I was a small child, collecting petals in the rose garden or loitering at the back of the house in the stable yard, it seemed that Wildacre was they very centre of the world with the sun defining our boundaries in the east at down, till it sank over our hills in the west in the red and pink evening.  The great arch it traced in the sky over Wildacre seemed to be a suitable boundary for our vertical influence.  

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

★★★★★

"It makes you wondering.  All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."

"Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it...It's a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are a spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano.  Not everyone can be an artist.  There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see."

Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah

★★★

"Don't trust anyone.  Be a cold fish.  I hurt no one.  And no one can hurt me."

The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory

★★★★★

" 'The truth is the last things that matters,' she said.  'And you can believe one thing of the truth and me: I keep it well hidden, inside my heart.' "

Mirabilis by Susan Coral

★★★

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

★★★★

"Gradually, they began to talk.  Overflow succeeded into silence, which is fulness...They confided to each other in an intimacy of the ideal, which even now nothing could have increased, all that was most hidden and most mysterious of themselves...These two hearts pored themselves out into each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's soul, and the young girl who had the soul of the young man."