"Difficult women are not all swashbuckling extroverts who shoot off their mouths and shout down their adversaries. Sometimes they just sit quietly and refuse to pretend to be agreeable."

".. You'd cupped your hands around your mouth and leaned over the railing, shouted your name into the air. I joined you, shouting mine, and we let our voices rise, leaping and echoing, flying over the city. My heart unclenched."

"I'm learning/ that I don't always/ have to make noise/ to be seen,/ that even my silence/ has a spine, a rumble/and says, I'm here/ in it's native tongue." -Silence

"It is a greedy monster too, the snow, because just look how it has swallowed everything; where is the ground now? Where are the flowers? The grass? The stones? The leaves? The ants? The litter? Where are they?" (p. 150)

"Leopard People read books by everybody and everything. We look inside & outside. But you have to be secure with yourself to do either."

"Maybe I come from where the sidewalk/ ends, or maybe I just read that in a book once./ It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes."

Who else wants to read a book by Scaachi Koul's dad?

Celeste Ng's style of seamlessly shifting point of view between characters makes this a study in empathy across all sides of conflicts. We need more books like this one. Beautiful and complex.

Yo, what if internet meanness and white supremacy were actual, literal villians that get defeated by amazing teenage superheroes? This is why I love YA fiction.

"I decided right then to stop pretending I knew more than I did. I would be myself, Leah Price, eager to learn all there is to know. Watching my father, I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room." (p. 229)

My new favorite Shakespeare adaptation. Ryan North might be the funniest person to rewrite a tragedy.

"We don't think of ourselves as 'prayer warriors.' A man must've come up with that term– men think anything difficult is war. But prayer is more delicate than battle, especially intercessory prayer. More than just a notion, taking up the burdens of someone else, often someone you don't even know. You close your eyes and listen to a request..

If you don't become them, even for a second, a prayer is nothing but words." pg. 38

"One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself- that is to say risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving."

This shout out to librarians just made me love The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl even more.

"Fool, he tells himself. She's not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself.

He can't resign himself." (p. 109)

"I glanced up now at the small, second-story window of the church, imagining the old pastor inside, drafting his sermon for the week. Where did your faith come from? he had asked. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn't have an answer. Perhaps, still, I had faith in myself. But faith in one's self is never enough."

"So the stories aren't just stories, is what you're saying. They're really secret knowledge disguised as stories."

"One could say that of all stories, younger brother."

I feel like I've been waiting for this book for the past 4 years. Thomas humanizes a movement and a terrifying social reality with nuance and kindness and hope.

"Now who's mixing up life and movies?" Newsreel mocks.
"It's different," she snaps, "My life is movies."

Stayed up till midnight reading comics. Worth every minute of lost sleep.

I've never read a book that was simultaneously aa infuriating and as hopeful as Stevenson's Just Mercy. His insight into the legal systems that create massive injustice in prisons and capital punishment is equal parts personal and academic. Highly, highly recommend.

I'm trying to think of a more intellectual way to say "all the feels." But I'm coming up short.
Really though. All of them.

"Charles had never done anything awkward or unsure in his life. Not in front of her. Not in her eyes. But now her broken heart saw every wrong-footed step he'd ever taken" (p. 32)

"As the cab drove off, I caught a glimpse of Paul in the crowd and felt a rush of retrouvailles, another one of those words that do not translate into English, which means 'the happiness of meeting someone you love again after a long time.'" (p. 397)

"When it comes to love, Aliza, I've been reserved enough for a lifetime. Cedric is worth a little daring." (p. 163)

Merry Christmas Eve!

"Yes, great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They'd met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take" (p. 178).

"When I cared about someone, I'd start to pick at all the flaws, highlight potential problems, and assume that everything would inevitably unravel. Deep down I just didn't think I deserved anything nice." p. 31

"I was caught in a no-man's-land—the gulf between English and Korean felt wider than the East River and the Han combined.
I was lonely, my linguistic loneliness echoing the dull ache that tugged continually at my heart."

Got choked up reading this to a class of 7 year olds today. (Also, they don't let each other kill spiders anymore because it might be Charlotte.)

"He arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life." (p. 102)

"When Hannah was younger, she had thought adults stayed up late every night, until two or three perhaps. She adds this to the list of things she's learned are untrue." (p. 104)

"But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight."

"he was charmed by that quality of hers that seemed both sophisticated and naive, an idealism that refused to be suffocated by gritty reality." (p. 81)

"Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way.. and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone." (p. 69)

Brown's first book on shame opens up a conversation we need to have about what makes us feel shame, how it affects our lives and relationships, and the steps we can take to become shame resilient.

"And yet there was something about it that was exceedingly fragile; it was as if Chinedu could conceive of faith only in extremes, as if an acknowledgment of a middle ground would mean the risk of losing everything." p. 165

"..having already reached conclusions in our own minds, we are loth to have them disturbed by facts." p. 89

pg. 160

pg. 29

If you can finish this book without at the very least writing to your representatives, we aren't reading the same book. Alexander makes you question practices you may have assumed to be harmless, or unavoidable, and think deeply about the role you play in continued injustice. The book loses focus and becomes a little repetitive towards the end, but remains a thoroughly researched and impassioned must read.

Anne Elliott just might be the most underrated Austen heroine. She's all repressed angst and selflessness and that's not always romantic. But I love the way Jane's wit comes through in this one and the more nuanced love story of two people who grew apart but never moved on.

"Our collective denial is not merely an inconvenient fact; it is a major stumbling block to public understanding of the role of race in our society, and it sharply limits the opportunities for truly transformative collective action." (p. 223)