Lara > Lara's Quotes

“Every love story is a potential grief story.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“It took a while, but I remember the moment – or rather, the suddenly arriving argument – which made it less likely that I would kill myself. I realised that, insofar as she was alive at all, she was alive in my memory. Of course, she remained powerfully in other people’s minds as well; but I was her principal rememberer. If she was anywhere, she was within me, internalised. This was normal. And it was equally normal – and irrefutable – that I could not kill myself because then I would also be killing her.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“A friend was someone you talked to in school, joined a club with, or who went to your church. A stupid fight in a basement could end a normal friendship. But a best friend was someone you could trust with your life, someone who you knew would be there for you. Being best friends was a promise to work through things no matter what.”
― Michael Barakiva, One Man Guy

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”
― Simone Weil

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.”
― Jamaica Kincaid

“Why limit yourself to just one best friend?”
― Lisi Harrison

“There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.”
― Judy Blume

“The truth will make you odd.”
― Judy Blume

“Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.”
― Jodi Picoult

“You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.”
― Jodi Picoult, Mercy

“You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?”
― Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

“Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“When you love someone, you say their name different. Like it's safe inside your mouth.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“The library is like a candy store where everything is free.”
― Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost

“We don’t get to choose our parents,” Sunny said. “If we did, some of us might choose never to be born at all.”
― Jamie Ford, Songs of Willow Frost

“For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society.”
― LeVar Burton

“Do a loony-goony dance
'Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain't been there before.”
― Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“It is not enough to simply teach children to read;
we have to give them something worth reading.
Something that will stretch their imaginations-
something that will help them make sense of their own lives
and encourage them to reach out toward people
whose lives are quite different from their own.”
― Katherine Paterson

“Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.”
― Arthur Miller

“Laughter is a rescue. p.204”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn