"Maybe we weren't meant for Paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute, we must march to the sound of drums."
- Kirk, "This Side of Paradise"

Getting to my seventeenth birthday felt like steps taken slowly down a path where I saw each pebble, noticed each leaf, and felt pleasantly bored and anticipatory at the same time. Now it feels as if I am running down the path, flat out and breathing hard.

- from Matched by Ally Condie

That's what it's come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we'll be free.

- from Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

The world pours in and overflows the heart till speech is useless, and that's a fact.

- from The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson

Sometimes all that really matters is the knowledge that someone else understands.

- from Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry

"Saturday, the Public Library will be unknowable. Citizens will forget the existence of the Library from 6am Saturday morning until 11pm that night. The Library will be under a sort of "renovation." It is not important what kind of renovation."

Loving the "Welcome to Night Vale" podcast! :)

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

- from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Books were safer than other people anyway.

- The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Nobody wants to hear that you will try your best. It is the wrong thing to say. It is like saying, "I probably won't hit you with a shovel."

- from "When Did You See Her Last?" by Lemony Snicket

To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing--the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.

- from Allegiant by Veronica Roth

What these novels offer that life does not offer is the opposite of a recreational spirit. It is seriousness. They posit effort and perseverance not only as necessary to salvation but as salvation itself. It is when your own life doesn't require of you the effort, concentration, and intensity of aim that L'Amour's heroes need to stay alive that you want to be out with them in a Wyoming blizzard with a murderer on your tail fifty miles from Hat Creek Station.

- from West of Everything by Jane Tompkins

"Fighting is better than this waiting," Brienne said. "You don't feel so helpless when you fight. You have a sword and a horse, sometimes an axe. When you're armored it's hard for anyone to hurt you."
- from A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin

"It opens a whole can of worms when you go around making contact with people."
- from The Canning Season by Polly Horvath

Sincere--that was the hell of it. From a distance, one's adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one's own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot.
- from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Speak up, destiny, speak up! Destiny always seems decades away, but suddenly it's not decades away; it's right now. But maybe destiny is always right now, right here, right this very instant, maybe.
- from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about one's face in the desert sun. There was the sense of the imminent, the remorseless, the mindless; it coiled like a heat-maddened rattler, ready to strike at rolling tumbleweed.
- from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

When he said good-evening you felt that it was a good evening and that it was partly his doing that it was.
- from The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery

And it occurred to me that maybe we're not meant to get along, like maybe someone took a wrong turn in even thinking that should be anyone's goal. That in bouncing off each other we get to see stuff.
- from The Vacation by Polly Horvath

Robots in space have several clear advantages over astronauts: they are cheaper to launch; they can be designed to perform experiments of very high precision without interference from a cumbersome pressure suit; and since they are not alive in any traditional sense of the word, they cannot be killed in a space accident. Nevertheless, until computers can simulate human curiosity and human sparks of insight, and until computers can synthesize information and recognize a serendipitous discovery when it stares them in the face, robots will remain tools designed to discover what we already expect to find. Unfortunately, profound insights into nature lurk behind questions we have yet to ask.
- from Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Thursday afternoons can be tough. You've about had it with the week but the week hasn't had it with you.
- from When the Circus Came to Town by Polly Horvath