As an avid reader and fan of all things make-believe, I have always imagined what it would be like to live in Middle Earth, or attend Hogwarts, or walk through that wardrobe to Narnia. But the more I read, the more I realize that while these places are not necessarily real locations, they are in fact far more real than the veiled existences we often lead -- for they are fictional perspectives that depict the trials and trivialities of life in an entertaining and thought-provoking way. They contain classic themes; good vs. evil, small deeds vs. large gestures, death vs. life... yet while books portray these themes in a way that we all too often distance from our own existence, these same books are in fact packaged and sealed with a subtle narrative of what makes up the very lives we lead. And if you still don't believe me, I've laid out below some of my favorite quotes from books (with maybe a few exceptions); quotes that I noted because of how relatable and true to life they were.
1. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
– Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax"
2. “To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first and last time: Thus is your time on Earth filled with glory.”
– Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn"
3. “So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.”
– Margaret George's "Memoirs of Cleopatra"
4. “That’s the one-two punch right there, wanting to love and wanting to be loved. Everything else is pure idiocy – shiny fancy outfits, Geech-green cadillacs, sixty dollar haircuts, schlock radio, celebrity-rehab idiots, and most of all, the atomic vampires with their de-soul-inators and flag-draped coffins.”
– Tim Tharp's "The Spectacular Now"
(Side note: this image is from the movie, which is alright, but the book is 10x better)
5. "It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody. I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especially me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be what I really am. And I'm going to figure out what that is."
- Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"
6. “What are men to rocks and mountains?”
– Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"
7. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
– Nicole Krauss' "The History of Love"
8. “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, the most inexhaustible form of magic we have, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.”
– J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
9. “I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”
– John Steinbeck's "East of Eden"
10. “Age is a terrible thief. Just when you’re getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.”
– Sara Gruen's "Water for Elephants"
11. “The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. 'Someday' is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”
– Tim Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Workweek"
12. “Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love – well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.”
– Jodi Picoult's "The Storyteller"
13. “We're so arrogant, aren't we? So afraid of age, we do everything we can to prevent it. We don't realize what a privilege it is to grow old with someone.”
- Cecelia Ahern's "PS I Love You"
14. “This ancient lady was right too, and there always is a ‘me’ it happens to. Death is going to take the boundaries away from us, that we should no more be persons. That’s what death is about. When that is what life also wants to be about, how can you feel except rebellious?”
– Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March"
15. “For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars, screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes.”
– Bruno Schulz' stories
16. “It is youth’s felicity as well as its insuffiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future – flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only pre-figurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
17. "What must I choose? The weak lights, filtering through the chinks in the houses, or the distant light of the stars? Worst of all, when I'm among the stars I long for the small lights, and when I find my way into one of the little houses my soul yearns for the heavenly bodies."
- Hannah Senesh's Life and Diary
18. “Then she began to breathe and live, and every moment took her to a place where goodbyes were hard to come by. She was in love, but not in love with someone or something, she was in love with her life and for the first time in a long time everything was inspiring.”
- R.M. Drake
19. “The world is not in your books and maps. It’s out there.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit"
20. "In the end you can’t save your soul and life by thought. But if you think, the least of the consolation prizes is the world.”
– Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March"
21. "Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, —
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?"
- Percy Shelley's "To the Moon"
22. “Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.”
– Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible"
23. “There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! His heart seemed to cry.”
– James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
