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."