“To me, Jewish is knowing that you can‘t be asked to have pride in one part of your identity and then be told to have shame about another part.”

He turned away and drew his sword. What he meant to do with it, she could not say. There was no enemy there, no one to fight. Only her and him, amongst tall trees and fallen leaves. There are fights no sword can win, Catelyn wanted to tell him, but she feared the king was deaf to such words.

Ma calls. She tells me she is reading Slaughterhouse-Five. “It says here,” says Ma, “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” She says this to reassure me. As if she‘s reading the newspaper, and not a drawing of a gravestone in a book.

I have never fallen in love with a couple of character so quickly before as I have with Nimona and Ballister Blackheart 🖤💜

“Hodor said only, ‘Hodor.‘ That was all he ever said.”

“It was queer how sometimes a child‘s innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to.”

“He had touched her cheek, his thumb lightly tracing the line of a cheekbone. ‘Life is not a song, sweetling. You may learn that one day to your sorrow.‘”

“‘Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it,‘ the dwarf had told him, grinning. The world was full of cravens who pretended to be heroes; it took a queer sort of courage to admit to cowardice as Samwell Tarly had.”

“‘Let me tell you something about wolves, child. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths. So if you must hate, Arya, hate those who would truly do us harm.‘”

“‘Can a man still be brave if he‘s afraid?‘ he heard his own voice saying, small and far away. And his father‘s voice replied to him. ‘That is the only time a man can be brave.‘”

“Now you know why you must live. ‘Why?‘ Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling. Because winter is coming.”

“‘Every flight begins with a fall,‘ the crow said. ‘Look down.‘”

“Nothing just happens. Every news story is as strategically manufactured as the ads wedged between them. There‘s a story about housing prices. There‘s a commercial offering cash for gold. There‘s a story about a mass shooting. There‘s a commercial for antidepressants. When you‘re willing to acknowledge these patterns, you might never sleep soundly again.”

As Calvin becomes more stressed, so do I reading this book 😓😭

“We can‘t get lost in the meaningless metaphors of octopus tentacles and pyramids and secret symbols on the dollar bill. The villains don‘t hide behind cloaks, they grace magazine covers.”

This frame pretty much sums up the mood of this book so far. My sister and her husband got a copy to give me during a trip to London because of the name, but I never expected it to be so intense!

“Maester Luwin made a little boy of clay, baked him till he was hard and brittle, dressed him in Bran‘s clothes, and flung him off the roof. Bran remembered the way he shattered. ‘But I never fall,‘ he said, falling.”

“In the darkness, afterward, she would hold him very tightly, and her long brown curls would tumble over his chest, and she would whisper to him how much she loved him, and he would tell her he loved her and always wanted to be with her, and they both believed it to be true.”

“London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.”

Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Now they‘re gone, forever, no matter how long I stay here like faithful Hachiko, from their English reader. And yet I have an urge to stay here forever. An urge to punish myself by looking, by scouring every inch of tarred road and glittering gutter and veined dust-sprinkled leaf, in every season, at all times, for my boys....

Pearl fought the urge to run up and take her hand, to follow her down the hallway, as if they really were sisters, the kind of girls who would see each other through this kind of ordeal, the kind of girls who, years later, would hold each other‘s hands during childbirth. The kind of girls unfazed by each other‘s nakedness and pain, who had nothing in particular to hide from one another.

“....even though I laughed with them, it felt like I was watching the whole thing from somewhere else, like I was watching a movie about my life instead of living it.”

“Neal didn‘t take Georgie‘s breath away. Maybe the opposite. But that was okay - that was really good, actually, to be near someone who filled your lungs with air.”

“‘We dance,‘ Diana protested. Maeve has just laughed. ‘You dance differently when you know you won‘t live forever.‘”

When Lewis showed him the manuscript for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Tolkien was appalled at its inconsistencies. Not only had Lewis tossed together creatures from different mythological traditions, he even dragged Santa Claus into the story; as many critics have pointed out, a secularist Christmas figure has no logical business butting into a Christian allegory....

I don‘t even have the words to describe how amazing this book is. Beautiful, heartbreaking, warm, funny, and everything I could ever want in a novel.

I had met dozens of survivors of the death camps and formed professional connections with many of them due to my work at the museum but there was something more intimate to me about this moment, for here were two people who had gone through the worst of all possible experiences and survived it, and I was in love with their son and he, to my utter astonishment, appeared to be in love with me too.

"But this was Dublin, the nation's capital. The place of my birth and a city I loved at the heart of a country I loathed. A town filled with good-hearted innocents, miserable bigots, adulterous husbands, conniving churchmen, paupers who received no help from the State, and millionaires who sucked the lifeblood from it."

"I imagine that everyone around the table assumed I was a virgin when the fact was I had probably had more sex than any of them, even Julian, albeit in far less romantic settings. But they had experienced things that I never had, pleasures that I felt certain were superior to the ephemeral thrill of a quickly forgotten climax."

"Had I been lucky enough to find a person with whom I wanted to have regular sex while still being able to walk hand in hand with him on the streets of Dublin without being arrested, I would never have let him go."

"It was 1959, after all. I knew almost nothing of homosexuality, except for the fact that to act on such urges was a criminal act in Ireland that could result in a jail sentence, unless of course you were a priest, in which case is was a perk of the job."

"We're told not to go out by ourselves at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep our doors locked, carry pepper spray and rape whistles. The fear of men is ingrained in us from girlhood. Isn't that a form of terrorism?"

"I was wearing bright colors, refusing to apologize for my size. The dress made me feel defiant. For the first time, I didn't mind taking up space."

"We'll never fit society's idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We're free to live how we want. It's liberating, if you choose to see it that way."

"London was being renovated, and the wallpaper covering every surface of the city was no longer decorated with women. The default Londoner, the implied viewer of everything, was no longer male."

Don't let the bastards grind you down.

I keep forgetting how cheesy superhero comics are

Honestly, who needs Steve Trevor when we have Etta?

This book had me laughing the entire way. Jenny Lawson is a talented comedian and writer that not only made me cry with laughter but also made me feel like I belong in this world despite my anxiety.

omg 😂😂😂

How beautiful is this art?!

So so good! The art is amazing! The girls are amazing! The story, the mystery, the world - its all amazing! I can't wait to read volume 2!

Finding out this is set in the late '80s just makes it that much better 👌🏽