Quotables

Some of my Favorite Quotes from Books I've Read on my Kindle:

Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess (Gael Greene)
(Written about Julia Child)
Behind her, Paul Child caught it mid-topple and set it straight. What a team, I thought. Not only did they adore each other, but Paul was always there, seemingly content to swim in her wake, picking up whatever she might bowl over in her exuberant passage through life.

Dirty Sexy Politics (Meghan Mccain)
We learn some of the most important things in life by our failures and mistakes. If we never had things that we were sorry we’d done, or sorry we’d said, we would never be forced to take a hard look at ourselves—and make changes for the better.

It's All Relative: Two Families, Three Dogs, 34 Holidays, and 50 Boxes of Wine (A Memoir) (Wade Rouse)
That holidays were not—and did not have to be—perfect in order to be beautiful. It made me realize that all families are dysfunctional, especially during the holidays, and that while most celebrations are well-intended, they are also usually diarrhea-inducing.

It's All Relative: Two Families, Three Dogs, 34 Holidays, and 50 Boxes of Wine (A Memoir) (Wade Rouse)
There were even career Barbies, brainy Barbies who—for some reason—did not find it fulfilling enough to live off their beauty alone; no, they had to attend med school and become surgeons and pet doctors, a notion that unnerved me greatly.

Chocolate & Vicodin (Jennette Fulda)
People wanted there to be a narrative with a tidy ending so all the loose ends could be wrapped up. When Native Americans looked at the stars, they made up tales about how those dots of lights were first lit and where the world came from. A turtle might not actually be holding up the Earth, but it made for a good story. It gave meaning where there was none.

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (Donald Miller)
Love, for example, is a true  emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually  feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love,  yet love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty.  Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in  light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that  are true that don't make any sense.

It Chooses You (Miranda July)
I kept the house because the rent is cheap and I write there; it’s become my office. And the great northern beans, the cinnamon, and the rice keep the light on for me,  should anything go horribly wrong, or should I come to my senses and reclaim my position as the most alone person who ever existed.

At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life (Wade Rouse)
Don’t you have something to say to the Lord?” And I did. I wanted to ask Him how He could be cruel enough to take my brother and leave me alone in rural America. I wanted to ask Him why I liked boys, no matter how many Farrah Fawcett or Raquel Welch posters I hung in my room. I wanted to ask him when it would be OK to stop hating myself. I wanted to ask God how many blows I was going to take and if my faith was supposed to be shaken and rocked at such an early age in order for me to fully grasp what faith is all about.

At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life (Wade Rouse)
I have read the Bible. I have studied the Bible. But we all fall short, every day, in one way or another. Our goal is to try to make the right decisions, to be good people. When all is said and done, I believe our final spiritual test will be akin to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?: Each of us, one-on-one, with God, trying to answer some hard-ass questions. And all without a phone-a-friend or fifty-fifty.

Father Fiction (Donald L. Miller)
Self-assurance is beautiful. A choosy girl is beautiful. Intelligence is beautiful. A girl who isn’t begging to be loved is beautiful. A woman who loves God is beautiful. A woman who does not manipulate men with her appearance is beautiful.

The Next Best Thing (Jennifer Weiner)
In Florida, where the Golden Girls lived, the weather was always warm and the skies were always sunny, and no crisis could not be managed in twenty-two minutes plus two commercial breaks. In that happy land, not everyone was beautiful, or young, or perfect. Not everyone had romantic love. But everyone had friends, a family they’d  chosen. It was that love that sustained them, and that love, I imagined, could sustain me, too.

Then Came You (Jennifer Weiner)
I lived my life like a meal that had been set in front of me, never asking if there were other choices or even if I was hungry.

Then Came You (Jennifer Weiner)
The thing about bad decisions is that they don’t feel like bad decisions when you’re making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life (Donald Miller)
The Voice I am talking about is a deep water of calming wisdom that says, Hold your tongue; don’t talk about that person that way; forgive the friend you haven’t talked to; don’t look at that woman as a possession; I want to show you the sunset; look and see how short life is and how your troubles are not worth worrying about; buy that bottle of wine and call your friend and see if he can get together, because, remember, he was supposed to have that conversation with his daughter, and you
should ask him about it.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life (Donald Miller)
They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.

Water for Elephants  (Sara Gruen)
But then in your thirties something strange starts to happen. It’s a mere hiccup at first, an instant of hesitation. How old are you? Oh, I’m—you start confidently, but then you stop. You were going to say thirty-three, but you’re not. You’re thirty-five. And then you’re bothered, because you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. It is, of course, but it’s decades before you admit it.

The Paris Wife: A Novel (Paula McLain)
There was only today to throw yourself into without thinking about tomorrow, let alone forever. To keep you from thinking, there was liquor, an ocean’s worth at least, all the usual vices and plenty of rope to hang yourself with. But some of us, a very few in the end, bet on marriage against the odds. And though I didn’t feel holy, exactly, I did feel that what we had was rare and true—and that we were safe in the marriage we had built and were building every day.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A Novel (Aimee Bender)
It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty: A Novel (Joshilyn Jackson)
Now, I try not to be overly superstitious; I like black cats about as much as I like any other color cat, and I’ll go straight under any number of ladders if you put the right kind of pie on the other side.

Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Dawn of the Modern Woman (Sam Wasson)
There are those who believe they are truly loved when they truly aren’t, and others who suspect that despite sincere reassurance to the contrary, no one really loves them at all.