Suzanne Berne

In my experience, people's sorrows are always in danger of bursting out; it's only through careful inattention that they can be contained

Millions of microscopic fragments of Julia now lay, invisibly, on the speckled beige linoleum tiles of the classroom floor. What was left in her chair was a phantom of Julia, which she learned to project at these moments, by sheer force of will, until she could resemble herself, a process that would take days, even weeks, and was never entirely successful.

He’s a real romantic,” said my mother. “Romantics are usually bastards, in case you haven’t noticed.

He was a mostly mild man with a weakness for passion, a suburban father burdened with the heart of a Russian hero without any sort of balancing grand intellect or ironic world view. The yearning itself, the recklessness, that’s what lured him.

What else could a person do, she thought, staring hard at the darkness, but try to be happy? However confused and wrong-looking the attempt might be. And then whatever happens afterward all you could do was bear it, because whatever you could not bear you had to carry.

A. M. Homes

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.

I liked the fact she understood how we all have little secret habits that seem normal enough to us, but which we know better than to mention out loud.

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.

People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.

I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?

I’m trying to find some piece of myself that is truly me, a part that I would be willing to wear like a jewel around my neck.

Ali Smith

Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.

She likes to read, she reads all the time, and she prefers to be reading several things at once, she says it gives endless perspective and dimension.

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.

Forgetting it is important. We do it on purpose. It means we get a bit of a rest. Are you listening? We have to forget. Or we’d never sleep ever again.

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.

There are things that can't be said, because it's hard to have to know them.

Eimear McBride

Hurt me. Until I am outside pain.

I am tired. Too full of stuff I've done. Where my legs hurt where my scalp hurts. I'll not fight the thing inside me anymore. Let it eat me up. Please God. I want it to.

Board my body up. I’m not for loving. Anymore.

You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.

For all of that I wanted to be out of it. All of that. You wanted to be in.

Besides it’s as nothing to the death of a child. He doesn’t mind telling you his faith was sorely tried. There’s no grief like a parent’s.

Life makes itself with little heed for the appropriate.

Just dandelion leaves trod all down his path with this going away and the coming back. Some great ending it feels like. For now though, just go through his broke door.

Magnificent, somehow. To give in. Wreck yourself so completely. The beauty of it.

Helen Dunmore

I wish I was away in Ingo
Far across the briny sea
Sailing over deepest waters
Where neither care nor worry trouble me.

In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister.

We are creatures of story.

They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin. But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?

The word 'personal' is one of my aversions. Personal loan. Personal hygiene. Personal safety. It's only a way of wrapping up bad news that you're in debt, or dirty, or likely to be mugged.

Anne Michaels

Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.

Linda Grant

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography.

You cannot have a taste for minimalist décor if you seriously read books.

Without a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly insubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a new life in someone else’s library. But at least the torrent of books that kept arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs. I was being freed from the burden of all those bloody books.

What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms. Where is the equivalence?

How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.

Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it.

Reading wasn’t my religion – it was my oxygen.

Kate Grenville

How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.

Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped way like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.

Anyone can be lovely, but you are rare.

What an astonishing thing, that her praise filled his heart.

It crossed Farren's mind that although death seemed big, life was even bigger.

This place had been here long before him. It would go on sighing and breathing and being itself after he had gone, the land lapping on and on, watching, waiting, getting on with its own life.

Ain't nothing in this world just for the taking...A man got to pay a fair price for taking...Matter of give a little, take a little.

Standing in the dusk watching the great yellow eye of the tram light rushing towards her, she understood why some words were worth binding in leather and handing on. In the darkest hour, all the other humans who'd known dark hours were there with you. They'd been to the dark places before you, and they were with you now.

Valerie Martin

He put a dark place in me and I can't forgive him for that. But it's a part of me now and how can I regret what I am - though it often makes me sad.

Sex can be estranging; it can drive two otherwise compatible people apart.

Much as we might imagine we can leave the past behind, it has a nasty way of pressing its hoary old face against the window just as we were sitting down to the feast.

I see I have this patience to wait it out, and the truth is no matter how dark I feel I would never take my own life, because when the darkness is over, then what a blessing is the feeblest ray of light!

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother's death was part of God's plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times--- his plan is to kill us all, and if an innocent child dies in agony and a wicked man breathe.

Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination.

Andrea Levy

There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they'd been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.

Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live.

He looked so pained that I dreamed of taking his hands and making him dance.

Describe snow to someone who's lived in the desert. Depict the colour blue for a blind man. Almost impossible to fashion the word.

Paved with gold, no - but, yes, diamonds appear on the ground in the rain.

We went up and up into the heavens until people were just dots below us. As we hung right at the top--the twinkling electric lights below mingling with the stars--Father said something I will never forget. He said, 'See here, Queenie. Look around. You've got the whole world at your feet, lass.