Inspirational/Thought-Provoking Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018.  

If there’s one thing this week’s theme inspires me to do is to take better notice of good quotes. Honestly, a lot of times I am able to admire a quote, but for some reason I’m not the sort of person to jot it down. All that is to say, it’s going to take some scouring to come up with ten quotes, and even then they won’t necessarily be my top per say. More of a group of words I’ve liked in the past if you will 😉

“I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason.” 

― Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret

I read Hunger: A Memoir of (my) Body earlier in the year, and let me tell you; if I could cite the entire book as a quote I would. In the spirit of that I’ll quote several and count it as one, because why not?

“This is the reality of living in my body: I am trapped in a cage. The frustrating thing about cages is that you’re trapped but you can see exactly what you want. You can reach out from the cage, but only so far.” 

Roxane Gay, Hunger

“This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not.”

Roxane Gay, Hunger

“As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. I live in a contradictory space where I should try to take up space but not too much of it, and not in the wrong way, where the wrong way is any way where my body is concerned.” 

Roxane Gay, Hunger

“It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth.”

Roxane Gay, Hunger

“And when you start to feel real success… you have to stop and ask yourself if you think you really deserve it. Anyone that isn’t a complete asshole will come up with the answer ‘No.’ Because of course you don’t. When guys you grew up with are working three jobs. Or they’re lost overseas… Of course you don’t deserve it. You have to learn how to reconcile those two things. Having it and not deserving it.” 

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it.

Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

In one of those stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night. And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend…I shall not leave you.” 

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I feel like I’m broken—like I don’t fit together anymore. Like there’s no more room for me in the world or something. Like I’ve overstayed my welcome here on Earth, and everyone’s trying to give me hints about that constantly. Like I should just check out.” 

― Matthew Quick, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock

“Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don’t know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn’t you. That isn’t you at all.” 

― Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” 

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad.” 

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“But boys will be boys, our favorite phrase that excuses so many things, while the only thing we have for the opposite gender is women, said with disdain and punctuated with an eye roll.”

Mindy McGinnis, The Female of the Species

“The worst part of being truly alone is you think about all the times you wished that everyone would just leave you be. Then they do, and you are left being, and you turn out to be terrible company.”

John Green, Turtles All The Way Down

And if for some reason you’ve stuck around this long, this is the point where you find out I’m cheating and doing 12 instead of 10.

“Creating art is a lonely task, which is why we introverts revel in it, but when we have fans looming over us, it becomes loneliness of a different sort. We become caged animals watched by zoo-goers, expected to perform lest the crowd grow bored or angry. It’s not always bad. Sometimes we do well, and the cage feels more like a pedestal.”

Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters

“Just because love don’t look the way you think it should, don’t mean you don’t have it.” 

Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender