Quotes: Every You, Every Me by David Levithan

I reecently finished another David Levithan’s book, Every You, Every Me and as usual I’m overwhelmed with many great quotes and words of wisdom from David. He is really a genius! So before I write my review for the book I decided to share first to all of you David’s clever and thought provoking words.

“You don’t know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can’t know every me, and I can’t know every you.”

LIFE

“I don’t want you to think I got through this undamaged, okay? But I’m learning to live with it. Because otherwise, the damage is all you are.”

“My mind was getting away from reality again, and I reluctantly drew it back in. There is no getting away from reality.”

“Your life is inescapable. Unless you decide to escape it.”

“Everyone tried with me. And everytime, it felt like the whole point of life was to see if trying was ever enough.”

“There is no such thing as no choice. There is always a choice. The only question is whether it’s a bearable one.”

“That word again. Happy. It’s a curse. The pursuit of happiness makes us deeply unhappy. It’s a trap. 

LOVE / RELATIONSHIPS

“Let’s always love each other, and never be in love with each other.”

“This is the thing they don’t tell you about being a third wheel – it’s not like you’re the wheel that’s added on. You were one of the original two wheels, but suddenly you’re not so important anymore. The relationship drives fine without you.”

“If you zoom close-if you get really close to someone, if you really get close to yourself-then you lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can’t see anything anymore.”

MEMORIES

“I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers.
Our brain does that sometimes.
Or at least mine does.”

“There’s no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it’s in a flash or long after you’ve begged it to stop.”

“I couldn’t remember ordinary moments, only the ones that had made an impression. Ordinary moments were the ones that fell away first.”

“A photograph it a souvenir of a memory.
It is not a moment.
It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.”

“Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty – with empty, you are aware of what’s supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.”

“I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.”

“I can’t stop looking, even when I want to have to stop. I get lost in ifs. They are always there if if if if and I should only be able to tune in to them if I’m on the right frequency. But that’s the thing about me: the frequencies don’t divide.”

“My mother said I should have a ‘change of scenery.’ The word scenery made be think of a play. And as we were driving around, it made sense that way. Because no matter how much the scenery changed, we were still on the same stage.”

“That whole week, we started to divide things into those two categories: anything or something. A piece of jewelry bought at a department store: anything. A piece of jewelry made by hand: something. A dollar: anything. A sand dollar: something. A gift certificate: anything. An IOU for two hours of star-watching: something. A drunk kiss at a party: anything. A sober kiss alone in a park: something.”

DEATH

“I have always been aware of how I break.
I know what kind of situations will break me.
I know what kind of people will do it.
I know how much it will hurt.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” you said one night. “Does death bring freedom, or is it the end of freedom?”

“But death is not freedom. For a moment, it can look like freedom. But then it’s death.

Quotes: Just One Day by Gayle Forman

Just sharing some of lovely quotes from Gayle Forman’s book, Just One Day. I love every bit of this book just like Gayle Forman’s If I Stay and Where She Went. In this one I adore the travel part of the novel. Paris is just one of my dream place to explore, and reading this is just like visiting every corner of Paris with wonderful companions with me. Love all the travel insights/quotes from this book so I’m sharing them and more to all of you. Enjoy reading!

TRAVEL

“Travelling is like a talent, like whistling or dancing. And some people have it.”

“Travelling’s not something you’re good at. It’s something you do. Like breathing. You can’t work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.”

“…everything is happening all the time, but if you don’t put yourself in the path of it, you miss it. When you travel, you put yourself out there. It’s not always great. Sometimes it’s terrible. But other times it’s not so bad.”

“He’s a traveler. A drifter, really. Accidents are the defining force in his life.”

“You thought too hard. Same with travel. You can’t work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.”

“At the start of the trip, I took shots of the sights. The Colosseum. Belvedere Palace. Mozart Square. But I stopped. They never came out very well, and you could get postcards of these things. But there are no postcards of this. Of life.”

“… preferred to experience something rather than obsessively record it.”

“It feels like the city is telling secrets down here, privy only to those who think to listen.”

LIFE

“Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.”

“. . . it already seems pretty obvious that the world is divided into two groups: the doers and the watchers. The people things happen to and the rest of us, who just sort of plod on with things.”

“Sometimes you can’t know until you know.”

“You never know what will last.”

“I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don’t put yourself in the path of it, you miss it.”

“It’s funny the things you think you’re scared of until they’re upon you, and then you’re not.”

“When the sun shines, you let it shine on you.”

“Forward momentum. That’s my new motto. No regrets. And no going back.”

“The little things that happen. Sometimes they’re insignificant; other times, they change everything.”

“The sound is clear and strong as a bell, and it fills me with joy, and it’s like, for the first time in my life, I understand that this is the point of laughter, to spread happiness.”

LOVE

“Part of me knows one more day won’t do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”

“You have to fall in love to be in love, but falling in love isn’t the same as being in love.”

“And that’s when I understand that I have been stained. Whether I’m still in love with him, whether he was ever in love with me, and no matter who he’s in love with now, Willem changed my life. He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.”

“Stains are even worse when you’re the only one who can see them.”

“Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.”

“I realize then that it’s not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.”

“Even if you find him. Even if he didn’t leave you on purpose, he can’t possibly live up to the person you’ve built him into.”

“The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides. Which I think is a rather handy metaphor for falling in love.”

PRETENDING

“No one is who they pretend to be.”

“I don’t know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don’t want to be her anymore.”

“…I’m an expert faker. I’m so good at faking I don’t even know when I’m doing it.”

“The people we pretend at, they’re already in us. That’s why we pretend them in the first place.”

Quotes: Slammed by Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover‘s Slammed series is one of the few contemporary series I loved so much and actually made it to my favorite reads. I haven’t tried reviewing any book yet from this series, because I know that I will just ramble too much and won’t justify how wonderful they are.

Anyway, since I’m not capable of writing a coherent thoughts at the moment, I will just share some beautiful lines that I loved from the first book, Slammed. Actually, there so much more I want to share like the beautiful and hearth-felt poems from the book, but I think that you need to read the story on your own to fully experience the beauty of those lines. I’m planning to do a reread of all three books of this series soon and hopefully after that I’ll be able to share my thoughts coherently to all of you and convince you more how great this series is. For the now, let me just tease you all with these quotes from the first book.

LIFE

“If I live the life I’m given, I won’t be scared to die.”

“Don’t take life too seriously. Punch it in the face when it needs a good hit. Laugh at it.”

“It’s not just lies they’re referring to. It’s life. You can’t run to another town, another place, another state. Whatever it is you’re running from-it goes with you. It stays with you until you find out how to confront it.”

“It wasn’t death that punched you, Layken. It was life. Life happens. Shit happens. And it happens a lot. To a lot of people.”

“…sometimes life doesn’t happen in chronological order.”

“Nothing is permanent. The only thing any of us have in common is the inevitable.”

LOVE

“I’ve never regretted it. Questioned it? Sure. But never regretted.”
“Is there a difference?” I ask.
“Absolutely. Regret is counterproductive. It’s looking back on a past that you can’t change. Questioning things as they occur can prevent regret in the future. I questioned a lot about my relationship with your father. People make spontaneous decisions based off of their hearts all the time. There’s so much more to relationships than just love.”

“You’ve been doing so much thinking with your head that you’re ignoring your heart completely. There has to be a balance. The fact that both of you are letting other things consume you is about to ruin any chance you’ll ever have at being happy.”

“Always remember there is nothing worth sharing, like the love that let us share our name.”

DEATH

“Death. The only thing inevitable in life.”

“But now–it’s like God has it out for us. Why both of them? Wasn’t my dad enough? It’s like death came and punched us square in the face.”

LIES

“The weight of lies will bring you down, follow you to every town ’cause nothing happens here that doesn’t happen there.”

POETRY

“The points are not the point; the point is poetry.”

“So what if the heartaches you wrote last year isn’t what you’re feeling today. it may be exactly what the person in the front row is feeling. What you’re feeling now, and the person you may reach with your words five years from now- that’s why you write poetry.”

“People are free to write what they want to write about. But the thing that bothers me is, what if the person who writes it doesn’t want to relive it? What if a dude performs a slam about a bad breakup, but then he gets over it and moves on? He falls in love with some other chick, but now there’s probably this YouTube video floating around on the internet of him talking all sad about how his heart got broke. That sucks. If you perform it, or even write it down, someday you’ll have to relive it.”

SOME REMINDERS

“Question everything. Your love, your religion, your passion. If you don’t have questions, you’ll never find answers.”

“Push your boundaries, that’s what they’re there for.”

“Choose your battles, but don’t choose very many.”

“Never judge others. You both know good and well how unexpected events can change who a person is. Always keep that in mind. You never know what someone else is experiencing within their own life.”

“…respect the hand that I was dealt. And to be grateful I was even dealt a hand.”

“Understanding a situation doesn’t always make it easier”

“Keep an open mind; it’s the only way new things can get in.”

“Laugh a lot. Never go a day without laughing at least once.”

“People can’t cry forever. Everyone eventually falls asleep.”

 

Quotes: The Fault in Our Star by John Green

Rainy nights make me want to cuddle up in bed and just read. And tonight I’m particularly incline revisiting the sweet and painful story of Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters from John Green‘s The Fault in our Stars. When I first read the book on the day it was released, I am so full of emotions that I never tried reviewing the book. I accepted the fact that there is no way I’ll be able to write my thoughts and feelings about the story and my reading experience. There’s no way I can justify John Green’s greatness and The Fault in our Stars perfections. Not when I first read the book, not tonight and not in the near future. Though tonight I want to share some beautiful, poignant and emotional quotes from the book. Lines that makes me ponder, realize and feel.

LOVE

“I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.”

“I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

“Some people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.

“Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

PAIN & DYING

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

“Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.”

“That’s the thing about pain,” Augustus said, and then glanced back at me. “It demands to be felt.”

“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

“Without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.”

“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”

“We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”

PLACES

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

“The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.”

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it – or my observation of it – is temporary.”

BOOKS

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

“And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal.”

LIFE & EVERYTHING ELSE

“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”—I gestured encompassingly—“will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

“The real heroes anyways aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”

“There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

“My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.”

“There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

Quotes: Clash by Nicole Williams

Before I review Nicole Williams’s second installment to Crash series, let me tease everyone first with some of wonderful quotes from the book. Just like with David Levithan’s Every Day there so many nice quotes from Clash that I want to share. Though they are not as profound as those in Every Day, I think that they are still worth sharing. So allow me to use the quotes feature of this blog as an excuse to share the quotes to all of you since I know I can’t use them all in my review. Also, watch out for me review for Clash that will be up tonight.

Book Quotes from Clash:

“If you say you’re going to trust your man, then trust your man. Don’t revoke that privilege when he needs it most.”

“When are you going to stop looking at all the reasons you shouldn’t be together and start focusing on the reasons you should be?”

“I couldn’t fix us until I fixed me. And he couldn’t fix me for me. It was a task that all my own.”

“It’s because you’re letting the fairy tales you grew up hearing in storybooks and the baseless ideals of love cloud your mind. Love isn’t easy. Especially the really good kind. It’s difficult, and you’ll want to rip your hair out just as many days as you’ll feel the wind at your back. But it’s worth it. It’s worth fighting for. Don’t let what isn’t real blind you from what is. Life isn’t perfect, we sure as shit aren’t perfect, so why should we expect love to be?”

“Love is what brings you together, Lucy. But it’s the blood, sweat, and tears of hard work that keeps you together.”

“Love isn’t only love, sweetheart. It’s hard work, and trust, and tears, with even a few glimpses of devastation. But at the end of each day, if you can still look at the person at your side and can’t imagine anyone else you’d rather have there, the pain and heartache and the ups and downs of love are worth it.”

“Love is just as much suffering as it is sweetness. If it was perfect, that’s what they’d call it. They wouldn’t call it bittersweet.”

“I’m saying you should choose Jude, if at the end of the day, when the world is against you, you can say with absolute certainty that you want Jude at your side. Can you say the good times are worth the bad times?”

“I can forgive a man’s past faults, his present shortcomings, and his future failures if every minute of every day he loves me like it’s his religion.”

“Mom told me that love is like a seed. You’ve got to plant it to grow. But that’s not all. You need to water it. The sun needs to shine just enough, but not too much. The roots have to take hold,” he continued, narrowing his eyes in concentration. “And from there, if it pops its head above the surface, there are about a million things that could kill it, so it takes a whole lot of luck too.” “You can’t plant a seed and hope it will grow on its own. It takes a lotta work to make anything grow.”

We fight. I’m used to that. Sure, that fight was the scariest ass one we’ve ever had, but you’re here now. That’s all that matters. No matter how many fights we have, or how much they tip the Richter scale, none of it matters as long as at the end of the day, you’re still with me.”

“I could hold you prisoner here for the rest of the day and list everything I love about you, but that’s only half of it,” he explained, turning toward me. “The other half is something I can’t put into words. Something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. It’s something that ties me to you, and you to me. Call it chemistry, call it fate, call it whatever you want. All I know is that I’m yours just as much as you’re mine, Luce. That’s the surest thing I’ve ever known.”

Then what are you doing here, Luce?” he asked, his voice elevating. “You want time? You want space? Fine. I gave that to you. But then you keep throwing yourself back into my life whenever the hell you choose. No warning. No apology, No permanence. You show up at my front door and sneak out the back without so much as a goodbye,” he continued, never taking his eyes off of me. “You couldn’t take the up and down. The roller coaster was going to kill you. You know what I can’t take? You in and back out of my life before I even knew you were there in the first place. You looking at me the way you are now and then able to turn your back and walk away five minutes later.” His hands clenched over my cheek before he lowered it. “That is what will kill me. I can’t live wondering if you’re still mine to claim.”

Quotes: Every Day by David Levithan

I’m supposed to review Every Day by David Levithan but then I realized I can’t possibly include all the lovely quotes from the book in my review. And since I don’t want to skip sharing David Levithan’s lovely passages and poignant messages to all of you, I decided to revive one of the blog features here, Quotes. This particular blog feature is a collection of quotations or author’s words from a specific book that I collect/compiled for the purpose of easily going back when I feel reading them again.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a meme that I will be doing every week. Even there are lots of books worth quoting, I don’t want to clutter my blog with regular meme post. After all I’m not good in following regular post schedule. I still blog when I feel blogging and I don’t have set of rules in here. I’m not good in following rules anyway.

Normally I only compiled quotes or passages from a single book in each blog post under this feature. Most of the passages were chosen because of their wisdom and thought-provoking ideas. Below are some of the quotes I personally chose that I think will somehow give you different views of life and love. Also, just so everyone know, I’ll be reviewing Every Day here on the blog even I am already featuring the book in his post. So watch out for that.

LIFE

“We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.”

“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces. I have learned to observe, far better than most people observe. I am not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live.”

“I am learning that a life isn’t real unless someone else knows its reality.”

“Self-preservation isn’t worth it if you can’t live with the self you’re preserving.”

“This is the trap of having something to live for: Everything else seems lifeless.“

“Part of growing up is making sure your sense of reality isn’t entirely grounded in your own mind.”

“There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.”

“I no longer think she is just being nice. She’s being kind. Which is much more a sign of character than mere niceness. Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”

“The clock always ticks. There are times you don’t hear it, and there are times that you do.”

“If you stare at the center of the universe, there is coldness there. A blankness. Ultimately, the universe doesn’t care about us. Time doesn’t care about us. That’s why we have to care about each other.”

“It’s only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, the inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98 percent in common with each other. yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren’t a whole lot of things that are different. Race is different purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion–whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2 percent that’s different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”

“If smart people are parodying it, that’s a sure sign that some less smart people are believing it.”

“I feel the universe is telling me something. And it doesn’t even matter if it’s true or not. What matters is that I feel it, and believe it.”

“There comes a time when the body takes over the life. There comes a time when the body’s urges, the body’s needs, dictate the life. You have no idea you are giving the body the key. But you hand it over. And then it’s in control. You mess with the wiring and the wiring takes charge.”

“It was so much easier when I didn’t want anything. Not getting what you want can make you cruel.”

“If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the initially painful and ultimately uncomfortable process of finding it.”

“And once again I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn’t make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.”

“I find faith in human perseverance, even as the universe throws challenge after challenge our way.”

LOVE

“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”

“Sometimes memory tricks you. Sometimes beauty is best when it’s distant.”

“Every relationship has a hard part. It’s not like a puzzle piece here there’s an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.“

“I wanted love to conquer all. But love can’t conquer anything. It can’t do anything on its own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.”

“The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations – all of them rearranging themselves so this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In your heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are just now arriving at the place you were always meant to be.”

“I am always amazed by people who know something is wrong but still insist on ignoring it, as if that will somehow make it go away. They spare themselves the confrontation, but end up boiling resentment anyway.”

“The unwarranted devotion. Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can’t deal with the fear of being alone. The hope tinged with doubt, and the doubt tinged with hope. Every time I see these feelings in someone else’s face, it weighs me down.”

“There are many things that can keep you in a relationship… Fear of being alone. Fear of disrupting the arrangement of your life. A decision to settle for something that’s okay, because you don’t know if you can get any better. Or maybe there’s the irrational belief that it will get better, even if you know he won’t change.”

“You like him because he’s a lost boy. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen before. But do you know what happens to girls who love lost boys? They become lost themselves. Without fail.”

“When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.”

“People take love’s continuity for granted, just as they take their body’s continuity for granted. They don’t realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it’s an added foundation to your life.”