the book thief.

Burial Rites

“I so often feel that I am barely here, that to feel weight is to be reminded of my own existence.”

- Hannah Kent

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door - Music Lessons - This American Life

“How is it that you have a chord here and then another chord there and then your heart breaks open? I don’t know the answer. Maybe it’s that music is about as physical as it gets. Your essential rhythm is your heartbeat. Your essential sound, the breath. We’re walking temples of noise. And when you add the human heart to this mix, it somehow lets us meet on a bridge we couldn’t get to any other way.”

- Anne Lamott

Sarah Thornhill

“It was a surprise to me that you could be more lonely, sitting with another person who didn’t speak to you, than out in an empty paddock.”

- Kate Grenville

The Crane Wife

“A story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, a story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us.”

- Patrick Ness

The Crane Wife

“To take his blade and cut into the pages of a book felt like such a taboo, such a transgression against everything he held dear, George still half-expected them to bleed every time he did it.

He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He’d never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no emails from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags if paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark - fancy, modest, scrap of paper, candy wrapper - moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut.

And how they looked on the walls! Lined up according to whatever whim.”

- Patrick Ness

Old Dogs are the Best Dogs

“Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, grey of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy, and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these things are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They shoe exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But above all, they seem at peace. This last quality is almost undefinable; if you want to play it safe, you can call it serenity. I call it wisdom.”

- Gene Weingarten

The Secret River

“How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.”

- Kate Grenville

To Kill a Mockingbird

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

- Harper Lee

Coraline

“Because,’ she said, ‘when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.”

- Neil Gaiman

The End of Your Life Book Club

“Mom taught me not to look away from the worst but to believe that we can all do better. She never wavered in her conviction that books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose—electronic (even though that wasn’t for her) or printed, or audio—is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in the human conversation. Mom taught me that you can make a difference in the world and that books really do matter: they’re how we know what we need to do in life, and how we tell others. Mom also showed me, over the course of two years and dozens of books and hundreds of hours in hospitals, that books can be how we get closer to each other, and stay close, even in the case of a mother and son who were very close to each other to begin with, and even after one of them has died.”

- Will Schwalbe

The End of Your Life Book Club

“I loved the people I met on all my trips, Will,” she said. “I loved hearing their stories and getting to know them and finding out what if anything we could all do to help. That’s enriched my life more than I can say. Of course you could do more—you can always do more, and you should do more—but still, the important thing is to do what you can, whenever you can. You just do your best, and that’s all you can do. Too many people use the excuse that they don’t think they can do enough, so they decide they don’t have to do anything. There’s never a good excuse for not doing anything - even if it’s just to sign something, or send a small contribution, or invite a newly settled refugee family over for Thanksgiving.”

- Will Schwalbe

Woman’s Best Friend

“Dogs change lives. Half Buddha, half Bozo, they keep us tethered to the earth, and they teach us to fly. Our dogs are our sanity keepers. They are our suicide-prevention task force. (There I’d be with the gun in my hand, and Fenton would look at me and say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and of course he’d be right, as always.) They are the worthy and willing recipients of our fierce, unrelenting, and unconditional love. They are our personal trainers, our gurus, our reason to get up in the morning, our bed-warmers, our muses, our teachers, our hearts.”

- Pam Houston

The End of Your Life Book Club

“One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they’ll elude you by hiding in improbable places: in a box full of old picture frames, say, or in the laundry basket, wrapped in a sweatshirt. But at other times they’ll confront you, and you’ll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn’t thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come to me. They make me feel, but I can’t feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can’t whack you upside it.”

- Will Schwalbe.

How To Be a Woman

“But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilising mental illness. Underneath every day - every action, every word - you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lack-lustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world - famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines - it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.”

- Caitlin Moran