Happy Tuesday, book friends! I got a surprise work from home day yesterday thanks to a roof replacement on my office building, so it doesn’t quite feel like a Tuesday. Yet the calendar tells me it’s time for another Top 5 Tuesday!
Top 5 Tuesday is a weekly meme created by Bionic Bookworm, now hosted by Meeghan Reads. If you’re interested in participating, check out their blog to get the details and the prompts for each week.
This week’s topic is book quotes! I’ll admit this struck fear into my bookish heart, because I do not have a good system for keeping track of quotes and therefore have no idea how I’ll compile this list. I do annotate books when I find a good quote, but I don’t tab them or track them in a journal or anything, so they’re not that easy to rediscover.
Still, let’s see what I can come up with!
From Wild by Cheryl Strayed:
“I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even what the word faith meant, in all of it’s complexity.”
-Cheryl Strayed
I read Wild for the first time when I was in college, and I was struck by this quote in particular. I had never found the words to describe my relationship to religion and spirituality before, and this struck me as exactly the right way to describe how I feel about it.
From H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald:
“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps…”
-Helen Macdonald
This quote resonated with me the first time I read H is for Hawk, but it really hit home when I re-read the book after experiencing grief for the first time. I was so glad to have this book to help me through that part of my life.
From Why Not Me by Mindy Kaling:
“I am notorious for making impassioned speeches about things nobody cares about.”
-Mindy Kaling
This was (and may still be, honestly) the pinned tweet on my Twitter profile because same, Mindy. Same.
From Waiting for Tom Hanks by Kerry Winfrey:
“The things that suck still suck, but they’re allowed to be happy. And maybe it means so much more that they’re happy, knowing that they still carry that sadness with them.”
-Kerry Winfrey
This book’s protagonist is a rom com lover born and raised in Ohio, so a lot of the narrator’s thoughts resonated with me. I like this commentary on why she loves rom coms so much, in particular.
I know I’m leaving out so many favorites, but these four are the only ones I can think of right now. Many of my favorite quotes come from memoirs, because I just love the way people can take their lives and make meaning from them.
What are your favorite book quotes?
Your Book Friend 
What wonderful quotes. You really can learn a lot from books. x
Those are all such great quotes!
Oh, they are lovely quotes. Helen Macdonald’s gave me goosebumps and I love Mindy Kaling. I don’t have a favourite quote, as it depends on the topic but this is one, I often end up saying and paraphrasing: “Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.” from The Outsiders xxx
That’s a good one! Thanks for sharing.
I look for quotes in my favourite authors books. It would be too much to keep quotes from all the books I read but my favourite author’s are always providing me with some great words of wisdom.
Great book quotes. I love ones that come to the rescue when you are feeling a bit ‘meh’. This is one that I really like – It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices. – Professor Dumbledore, from Harry Potter. #blogtober22
Yes, I love that quote! So many good ones from Dumbledore.
I have quite a few quotes from “Why not me?’. I love the one about not peaking in High School. And the Tom Hanks one reminds me of a quote on greif (I think by Augusten Burroughs about how after a loss, you’ll feel guilty the first time you laugh at something….nice collection. #Blogtober