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“. . . besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child.”
― Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“When you only do what is expected of you, you never learn what you would've done had you chosen for yourself.”
― Susan Meissner, The Shape of Mercy

“We understand what we want to understand.”
― Susan Meissner, The Shape of Mercy

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“I can't eat pizza. If we actually end up with a pizza, it's going to be your responsibility to consume it. Do not let me have any. Even if I ask for some." He pauses. "I'll probably ask for some.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Life is a mystery. But listen. Why did I turn up in your life in the first place? Do you believe in fate? Was your fate controlled by me, or was being controlled by me your fate? But in the end, aren't they just two sides of the same coin?”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“Wide acceptance of an idea is not proof of its validity.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“Sometimes a legend that endures for centuries... endures for a reason.”
― Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

“History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
― Dan Brown, The da Vinci Code

“Life is filled with secrets. You can't learn them all at once.”
― Dan Brown, The da Vinci Code

“But if you want to win, you're going to have to fight.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Like when people say they slept like a baby. Do they mean they slept well? Or do they mean they woke up every ten minutes, screaming?”
― Lee Child, Killing Floor

“I had to decide how to use that pressure. I had to decide whether it was going to crush me or turn me into a diamond.”
― Lee Child, Killing Floor

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“the real revolution for this century “would be to stop seeing the home as a gendered space�� but rather as both a male and female domain, just as we now see the workplace.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“The dictator has to keep the economy functioning in order to keep stealing from it.”
― Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“He'd been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“People aren’t made to float through the air. Unless we know the weight of our bodies, unless we feel the force of gravity, we’ll forget what we are, we’ll lose ourselves without even noticing.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing