Stephanie Garber

Every person has the power to change their fate if they are brave enough to fight for what they desire more than anything

She imagined loving him would feel like falling in love with darkness, frightening and consuming yet utterly beautiful when the stars came out.

Hope is a powerful thing. Some say it’s a different breed of magic altogether. Elusive, difficult to hold on to. But not much is needed

No one is truly honest,” Nigel answered. “Even if we don't lie to others, we often lie to ourselves. And the word good means different things to different people.

Whatever you've heard about Caraval, it doesn't compare to the reality. It's more than just a game or performance. It's the closest you'll ever find yourself magic in this world.

Every good story needs a villain.
But the best villains are the ones you secretly like.

She remembered thinking falling for him would be like falling in love with darkness, but now she imagined he was more like a starry night: the constellations were always there, constant, magnificent guides against the ever-present black.

No one is truly honest. Even if we don't lie to others, we often lie to ourselves. And the word good means different things to different people.

Amie Kaufman

You have me. Until the last star in the galaxy dies, you have me.

She is catalyst.
She is chaos.
I can see why he loves her.

I am frequently underestimated. I think it's because I'm short.

Perhaps bravery is simply the face humanity wraps around its collective madness.

The universe owes you nothing, Kady. It has already given you everything, after all. It was here long before you, and it will go on long after you. The only way it will remember you is to do something worth remembrance.

I should have told you I loved you every day. I should have given you the stars.

Patience and Silence had one beautiful daughter. And her name was Vengeance.

And there it is, against all hope, like the sun peeking out from behind the clouds. The smallest hint of a smile.

Miracles are statistical improbabilities. And fate is an illusion humanity uses to comfort itself in the dark. There are no absolutes in life, save death.

Rebecca Stead

Well, it's simple to love someone," she said. "But it's hard to know when you need to say it out loud.

Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering. But I tried to forget anyway, and to ignore the fact that I was remembering you all the time.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to.

Pajamas are good for the soul.

I don't know. I just feel stuck, like I'm afraid to take any steps, in case they're the wrong ones.

Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering.

Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore.

Ann Voskamp

I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.

Sometimes you don’t know when you’re taking the first step through a door until you’re already inside.

Practice is the hardest part of learning, and training is the essence of transformation.

Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing.... Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.

Simplicity is ultimately a matter of focus.

Satan prowls but he’s a lion on a leash.

Robyn Schneider

Oscar Wilde once said that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all. I don’t know if he’s right, but I do know that I spend a long time existing, and now, I intend to live.

And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.

Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding.

Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends'.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

Muriel Barbery

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that's it, an always within never.

If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.

I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terrible elegant. 

When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?

Do you know that it is in your company that I have had my finest thoughts?

David Benioff

I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.

Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful; when you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence; your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.

I'll tell you a secret.
Something they don't teach you in your temple. 
The Gods envy us. 
They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. 
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.

There are a few moments in your life when you are truly and completely happy, and you remember to give thanks. Even as it happens you are nostalgic for the moment, you are tucking it away in your scrapbook.

Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor. 

I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn't help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion.

Alan Cohen

Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful.

Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.

To grow, you must be willing to let your present and future be totally unlike your past. Your history is not your destiny

Do not resist events that move you out of your comfort zone, especially when your comfort zone was not all that comfortable.

It is not insult from another that causes you pain. It is the part of your mind that agrees with the insult. Agree only with the truth about you, and you are free.

There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.

Everything will line up perfectly when knowing and living the truth becomes more important then proving anything to anyone.

Erin McKean

You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.

If you want someone to stop listening to you go ahead and yell. If you want them to listen to every word, whisper.

Singing is probably the better medicine than half the stuff they sell in pill bottles, and it’s cheaper, too.

Experiences is just paying attention as time passes.

The rule is, don't speak of the dead, not don't speak ill of the dead's terrible relatives.

People say to me, ‘How do I know if a word is real?’ You know, anybody who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real.

Simon Van Booy

I read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.

You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.

Coincidences mean you're on the right path.

For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.

I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.

He thinks I suffer from depression. But I’m just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves.

Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in the universe, except that everyone else is still here.

Love between strangers takes only a few seconds and can last a whole life.

I think people would be happier if they admitted things more often. In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment -- we are all defined by something we can’t change.

The most significant conversations of our lives occur in silence.

For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.