Some Book Quotes I Love

"We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors. I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short." - from Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

"I see now that the loneliness of God is His strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God; His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die." - from Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw

"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice." - from Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

"One has only a life of one's own." - from Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

"People lean, either in their dreams or in their actions, toward that place where they suspect their inner lights are coming from." - from Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins

"What Shakespeare wanted to express about being a human being in Romeo and Juliet is that it's hard to care about two things at the same time - like caring about the Montague family and caring about Juliet, too...If Romeo had never met Juliet, maybe they both would have still been alive, but what would they have been alive for is the question that Shakespeare wants us to answer." - from "The Wednesday Wars" by Gary D. Schmidt

"Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life. My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim 'Get money, my son, honestly if you can; but get money.' My precept is 'Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but at any rate, do something'...Blot your misdeeds out by a good deed, as soon as you can." - from North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell