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."