When I was an impressionable teenager, I started to record bookish quotes. The act of writing them in a hardbacked notebook allowed me time to dwell on them, like I was turning around a sweet in my mouth. 

Some quotes resonated straight away - others were a little shrouded, but I knew they would make sense later down the road. I kept this up for quite a few years, and recently started browsing them again. I do like a good quote, though I'm more likely to record it on the notes app on my phone these days.

I'm no longer a student, less impressionable and a bit more wizened.  But  I still enjoy a good quote, and I often find myself stalled by a sentence during my reading. Words strung together that resonate like a bell, chiming with something in my experience.

So hey, this is my book blog, I can have as many sections as I want, so here are some of my favourite quotes, some familiar, some not.

I have tried to divide them into sections in a bid to keep some loose order but really, they're just a list of my favourite quotes.

Quotes about Families

All happy families are  alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in it's own way.

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina 

Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact ... The family was the house's soul.

Jonathan Franzen -The Corrections

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

Gabriel García Márquez - Love in the time of Cholera

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Matters of the Heart

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.

Charles Dickens - Great Expectations

He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It’s his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.
Markus Zusak - The Book Thief

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

Toni Morrison, Beloved

There is always something left to love.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred years of solitude

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Maya Angelou - I know why the caged bird sings

I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough.

Nicholas Sparks - The notebook

Life & Death and the Stuff In-between

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Oscar Wilde

Not all those who wander are lost.

JRR Tolkien - The fellowship of the ring

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
Douglas Adams - The long dark tea time of the Soul

Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.

Joseph Heller - Catch 22

I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louise May Alcott - Little Women

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare - The Tempest

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Robert Frost

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar

Friendship

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?

Henry David Thoreau

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.

Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C.S. Lewis - The Four Loves

I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky.

S.E. Hinton

Books and Reading

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

Jhumpa Lahiri - Books and Reading

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

Cicero

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Cicero

I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.

Neil Gaiman

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Alain de Botton


Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

W. Somerset Maugham

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Mark Twain