Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

★★★★

"There's something disturbing about recalling a memory and feeling utterly cold."

Wow, that only took me ... what, 5 days??  Good thing I was on vacation from both work and school otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get anything else done :)  I don't think I've ever loved a book and hated the main characters so much at the same time.  Crazy ending ... Has anyone else read anything by her???  

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

★★★

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said.  A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made.  Or a garden planted.  Something your hand touched someway so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.  The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said.  The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

"There must be something in books, something we can't imagine, to make a women stay in a burning house; there must be something there.  You don't stay for nothing."

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

★★★

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly in to the past."

"I hope she'll be a fool - that's the bast thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool."

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

★★★★★

"I turned to the window and gazed out in wonder.  The yard was full of children, almost all of whom I recognized from yellowed photographs.  Some lazed under shade threes; others tossed a ball and chased one another past flowerbeds exploding with color.  It was exactly the paradise my grandfather had described.  this was the enchanted island; these were the magical children.  If I was dreaming, I no longer wanted to wake up or at least not anytime soon."

"I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary.  I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.  Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss."

This book was #6 on my top ten list of 2013.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

★★★★
"I wanted more than anything to be that girl, to be a child again and carry crocus or hawthorn or larkspur instead of buckets of thistle.  I wanted to search the North Bay until I found Elizabeth, and apologize, and beg forgiveness.  I wanted to start my life over, on a course that would not lead me to this moment, this waking up alone in a city park, my own daughter alone in an empty apartment building.  Every decision I'd ever made had led me here, and I wanted to take it all back, the hatred and the blame and the violence.  I wanted to have lunch with my angry ten-year-old self to warn her of this morning and give her the flowers to point her in a different direction."