Top Ten Quotes I Loved From Books I Read In The Past Year

"Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up."

- Patti Smith, Just Kids

"You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it.  You just use the future to escape the present."

- John Green, Looking for Alaska

"The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"When it comes to men who are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do."

- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

"Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity. Virtuous people are simply those who have either not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them."

- Isadora Duncan, My Life

"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book."

- John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

"I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife on her back porch shaking out a snippet of red rug, and I made a sudden, frightened vow never to become that small, and to devote myself to getting bigger and bigger and bigger."

- Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

"Wanting to leave is enough."

- Cheryl Stayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer."

- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

"For I was never able to understand, then or later on, why, if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it. For I have never waited to do as I wished. This has frequently brought me to disaster and calamity, but at least I have the satisfaction of getting my own way."

- Isadora Duncan, My Life