—YOUR LIPS, MY LIPS, APOCALYPSE

 

 

…Last week I read 12 books, the bulk of which were stellar. One, The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig annoyed the hell out of me throughout much of the see-saw story, but when I’d finished I noticed I had dogeared an unusual amount of pages.

So, here are some of my favorite bits…

 

--It’s hard to predict, isn’t it? The things that will make us happy.

 

--Where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them. And she realized it was the same with lives.

 

--He was a good person, and good people were rare.

 

--She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true.

 

--There had, in short, been a lot of lives. And among those lives she had laughed and cried and felt calm and terrified and everything in between.

 

--“I’m sorry,” his other self said. “I’ve forgotten who you are.”

--“Don’t worry,” she said. “So have I.”

 

--So long as there are still books on shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.

 

--Kindness is a strong force. And rare.

 

--We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it.

 

--You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.

 

--“I have had many lives.”

--“Great. Is there one where you kiss me again?”

 

--The only way to learn is to live.

 

--Never underestimate the big importance of small things.

 

--You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.

 

--You can choose choices but not outcomes.

 

--You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.

 

--I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths. But maybe there are no easy paths. Maybe there are just paths.

 

--We spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

 

--Who needs a door when you have a book?

 

--Some things are just impossible to see.

 

--It’s a possibility that we are reaching the end of possibility.

 

--It would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunize you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness You can’t have one without the other.

There is no life where you can be in a state of happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.

 

--You are the library card.

 

--Because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward.

 

--The thing that looks most ordinary might end up being the very thing that leads you to victory.

 

--If something is happening to me, I want to be there.

 

--She was a waterfall of despair.

 

--You get near a black hole and the gravitational pull drags you into the bleak, dark reality.

 

--She went on Instagram and saw everyone had worked out how to live, except her.

 

--Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.  

 

--Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.