#booktag

Guilty Reader Book Tag

I’ve tracked this tag across a few different blogs before I finally found the original video and creator. It’s from ReadLikeWildfire. I really like these kinds of tags, because you get to know the blogger behind the posts. I like talking about myself and my book habits, there’s a free guilty reader confession for you! Let’s dive right in and if you like this tag, consider yourself invited to join…

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              BOOK STARTERS VOL.45    ANTHEM    AYN RAND

1. ❛ My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. ❜
   
2. ❛ What is my joy if all hands, even the unclean, can reach into it? ❜
   
3. ❛ What is my wisdom, if even the fools can dictate to me? ❜
   
4. ❛ What is my freedom, if all creatures, even the botched and impotent, are my masters? ❜
   
5. ❛ What is my life, if I am but to bow, to agree and to obey? ❜
   
6. ❛ I am done with this creed of corruption. ❜
   
7. ❛ Now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. ❜
   
8. ❛ I wished to know the meaning of all things. I am the meaning. ❜
   
9. ❛ I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a sacrifice on their altars. ❜
   
10. ❛ I am. I think. I will. ❜
    
11. ❛ The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them. ❜
    
12. ❛ I do not grant my love without reason. ❜
    
13. ❛ I honour men with my love. But honour is a thing to be earned. ❜
    
14. ❛ Centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him. ❜
    
15. ❛ Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak. ❜
    
16. ❛ I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. ❜
    
17. ❛ But what is freedom? Freedom from what? ❜
    
18. ❛ The sky is like a black sieve pierced by silver drops that tremble, ready to burst through. ❜
    
19. ❛ We must know that we may know. ❜
    
20. ❛ It is my eyes which see, and the sight of my eyes grants beauty to the earth. ❜
    
21. ❛ If danger threatens you, I shall face it also. If it be death, I shall die with you. ❜
    
22. ❛ I have followed you and I shall follow you wherever you go. ❜
    
23. ❛ Do as you please with me, but do not send me away from you. ❜
    
24. ❛ It is a sin to say this. ❜
    
25. ❛ I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them. ❜
    
26. ❛ My dearest one. Fear nothing of the forest. There is no danger in solitude. ❜
    
27. ❛ You are damned, and I wish to share your damnation. ❜
    
28. ❛ There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. ❜
    
29. ❛ For the first time this day, I remembered that I am the damned. I remembered it, and I laughed. ❜
    
30. ❛ May we be forgiven! ❜

           BOOK STARTERS VOL.44     DUBLINERS     JAMES JOYCE 

1. ❛ Yet your name is like a summons to all my foolish blood. ❜
   
2. ❛ Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. ❜
   
3. ❛ You live a short distance from your body. ❜
   
4. ❛ Too excited to be genuinely happy. ❜
   
5. ❛ I want real adventures to happen to myself. ❜
   
6. ❛ Gazing up into the darkness I see myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burn with anguish and anger. ❜
   
7. ❛ In your eyes I will ascent to an angelical stature. ❜
   
8. ❛ We cannot give ourselves: we are our own. ❜
   
9. ❛ No one would think he’d make such a beautiful corpse. ❜
   
10. ❛ Every bond, is a bond to sorrow. ❜
    
11. ❛ There is no doubt about it: if you want to succeed you have to go away. ❜
    
12. ❛ It fills me with fear, and yet I long to be nearer to it.  ❜
    
13. ❛ I wish you and yours every joy in life, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you. ❜
    
14. ❛ There’s no friends like the old friends. ❜
    
15. ❛ I feel that I have been outcast from life’s feast. ❜
    
16. ❛ Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name? ❜
    
17. ❛ I remember well your eyes, the touch of your hand and my delirium. ❜
    
18. ❛ My life will be lonely too until I, too, die, cease to exist, become a memory - if anyone remembers me. ❜
    
19. ❛ Drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas. ❜
    
20. ❛ In my heart I always despised him a little. ❜
    
21. ❛ All the seas of the world tumble about my heart. You are drawing me into them: you will drown me.  ❜
    
22. ❛ Then I remembered what I had been waiting for.  ❜
    
23. ❛ Every place is immoral. ❜
    
24. ❛ If it’s not your business it’s my business and I mean to see to it. ❜
    
25. ❛ I won’t be fooled. ❜
    
26. ❛ I could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. I listened again: perfectly silent. ❜
    
27. ❛ After three weeks she found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother. ❜
    
28. ❛ There was a heavy odour in the room – the flowers. ❜
    
29. ❛ Real adventures do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad. ❜
    
30. ❛ My body is like a harp and your words and gestures are like fingers running upon the wires. ❜

    BOOK STARTERS VOL.6    THE BURIAL AT THEBES    SEAMUS HEANEY   PT.1

1. ❛ Hurt and humiliation — But this, I can not take. ❜
   
2. ❛ The walls in there have ears. ❜
   
3. ❛ This is for your ears only. ❜
   
4. ❛ What is it? You have me scared. ❜
   
5. ❛ Whoever isn’t for us, is against us. ❜
   
6. ❛ You are just a body; to be dumped, disposed of like a carcass, left out for the birds to feed on. ❜
   
7. ❛ The dead will have to forgive me. ❜
   
8. ❛ From now on and no matter how your mind may I change, I will not accept your help. ❜
   
9. ❛ If death comes, so be it. There will be glory in it. ❜
   
10. ❛ Live, then; and live with your choice. ❜
    
11. ❛ I am doing what has to be done. ❜
    
12. ❛ Nothing is going to stop the ones that love you from keeping on loving you. ❜
    
13. ❛ Worst is the man who has all the good advice, and then because his nerve fails, fails to act in accordance with it, as a leader should. ❜
    
14. ❛ Only a loony would walk himself into this. ❜
    
15. ❛ Why do you need such fences and defences? ❜
    
16. ❛ Enough. Do not anger me. ❜
    
17. ❛ The gods, you think, will side with the likes of him? ❜
    
18. ❛ Watch it. You are over stepping. ❜
    
19. ❛ I warn you. You should keep a civil tongue. ❜
    
20. ❛ There is no such thing as an oath the can not be broken. ❜
    
21. ❛ Every now and then, the things you’d hardly let yourself imagine, actually happen. ❜
    
22. ❛ And you stand over this? This is the truth? ❜
    
23. ❛ The bigger the resistance, the bigger the collapse. ❜
    
24. ❛ Iron that’s forged the hardest, snaps the quickest. ❜
    
25. ❛ Even the wildest horses come to heel when they are reined & bitted right. ❜
    
26. ❛ That’s how guilt affects some people. They break and everything comes out. ❜
    
27. ❛ Will it be enough for you? To see me executed? ❜
    
28. ❛ So you know something no one else knows? ❜
    
29. ❛ They know it too. They are just too afraid to say it. ❜
    
30. ❛ If you die, how will I keep on living? ❜

        BOOK STARTERS VOL.43    THE WAVES    VIRGINIA WOOLF

1. ❛ There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me’. ❜
   
2. ❛ How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. ❜
   
3. ❛ Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body. ❜
   
4. ❛ I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me. ❜
   
5. ❛ For this moment, this one moment, we are together.  ❜
   
6. ❛ Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. ❜
   
7. ❛ I am as neat as a cat in my habits. ❜
   
8. ❛ Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me. ❜
   
9. ❛ I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room. ❜
   
10. ❛ We are cut, we are fallen. We are become part of that unfeeling universe
    that sleeps when we are at our quickest and burns red when we lie
    asleep. ❜
    
11. ❛ These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom. ❜
    
12. ❛ Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. ❜
    
13. ❛ The moment is all; the moment is enough. ❜
    
14. ❛ I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given. ❜
    
15. ❛ I am not one and simple, but complex and many. ❜
    
16. ❛ And if you are dead, I shall weep. ❜
    
17. ❛ But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful. ❜
    
18. ❛ But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love. ❜
    
19. ❛ I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams. ❜
    
20. ❛ Life is a dream surely. ❜
    
21. ❛ I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn. ❜
    
22. ❛ Oh, I am in love with life! ❜
    
23. ❛ I have been knotted; I have been torn apart. ❜
    
24. ❛ There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death. ❜
    
25. ❛ I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. ❜
    
26. ❛ I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me. ❜
    
27. ❛ I am above the earth now. I am no longer upright, to be knocked against and damaged. ❜
    
28. ❛ I see it all. I feel it all. ❜
    
29. ❛ Death is woven in with the violets. Death and again death. ❜
    
30. ❛ We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. ❜

         BOOK STARTERS VOL.42     ALIAS GRACE     MARGARET ATWOOD

1. ❛ If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged. ❜
   
2. ❛ When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass. ❜
   
3. ❛ Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word; - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase.  ❜
   
4. ❛ Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess,murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. ❜
   
5. ❛ If the world treats you well, you come to believe you are deserving of it. ❜
   
6. ❛ If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go. ❜
   
7. ❛ It’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength. ❜
   
8. ❛ There is no fool like an educated fool. ❜
   
9. ❛ There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. ❜
   
10. ❛ I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened. ❜
    
11. ❛ Underneath it all is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. ❜
    
12. ❛ And underneath all that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but ripe and splitting open of its own accord.  ❜
    
13. ❛ The small details of life often hide a great significance. ❜
    
14. ❛ Guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you. ❜
    
15. ❛ I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once? ❜
    
16. ❛ It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between. ❜
    
17. ❛ Some call this “Eve’s curse,” but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam. ❜
    
18. ❛ I don’t know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again. ❜
    
19. ❛ I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely. ❜
    
20. ❛ If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one. ❜
    
21. ❛ It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent. ❜
    
22. ❛ Today you wear your habitual expression of strained anxiety; you smell of violets. ❜
    
23. ❛ Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude. ❜
    
24. ❛ I wonder what would become of me, and comfort myself that in a hundred years I will be dead and at peace. ❜
    
25. ❛ For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the actual murderer. ❜
    
26. ❛ There is a “do this” or “do that” with God, but not any “because”. ❜
    
27. ❛ If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. ❜
    
28. ❛ They say, why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won’t bend in that direction any more. ❜
    
29. ❛ I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out. ❜
    
30. ❛ I see what you’re after. You are a collector. You think all you have to do is give me an apple, and then you can collect me. ❜

      BOOK STARTERS VOL.41     ORYX AND CRAKE     MARGARET ATWOOD

1. ❛ If you want to be an asshole, it’s a free country. Millions before you have made the same life choice. ❜
   
2. ❛ Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo. ❜
   
3. ❛ Nature is to zoos as God is to churches. ❜
   
4. ❛ After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? ❜
   
5. ❛ There’s something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you’re still alive. ❜
   
6. ❛ These things sneak up on me for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It’s probably a vitamin deficiency. ❜
   
7. ❛ Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast. ❜
   
8. ❛ You can’t buy it, but it has a price. Everything has a price. ❜
   
9. ❛ As a species were doomed by hope, then? You could call it hope. That, or desperation. ❜
   
10. ❛ I am not my childhood. ❜
    
11. ❛ Human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else and live on forever. ❜
    
12. ❛ “I’ll make you mine”, lovers said in old books. They never said, “I’ll make you me.” ❜
    
13. ❛ How much is too much, how far is too far? ❜
    
14. ❛ Expectation isn’t the same as desire. ❜
    
15. ❛ Why not cut to the chase? ❜
    
16. ❛ Maybe there aren’t any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. ❜
    
17. ❛ I thought you didn’t believe in God. ❜
    
18. ❛ I need at least the illusion of being understood. ❜
    
19. ❛ What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much. ❜
    
20. ❛ You are only looking at the dirt under your feet. It’s not good for you. ❜
    
21. ❛ I like to keep only the bright side of myself turned towards you.  ❜
    
22. ❛ Grief in the face of inevitable death. The wish to stop time. The human condition. ❜
    
23. ❛ So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. ❜
    
24. ❛ Would you kill someone you loved to spare them pain? ❜
    
25. ❛ When the water’s moving faster than the boat, you can’t control a thing. ❜
    
26. ❛ Don’t be so fucking sentimental. ❜
    
27. ❛ Wrong, as usual. ❜
    
28. ❛ Why do you want to talk about ugly things? ❜
    
29. ❛ I understand why serial killers send helpful clues to the police. ❜
    
30. ❛ Take your time, leave mine alone. ❜

          BOOK STARTERS VOL.40    DARK PLACES    GILLIAN FLYNN

1. ❛ I was not a lovable child, and I’ve grown into a deeply unlovable adult. ❜
   
2. ❛ The truly frightening flaw in humanity is our capacity for cruelty - we all have it. ❜
   
3. ❛ I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark. ❜
   
4. ❛ I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don’t even ripple. ❜
   
5. ❛ I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way. ❜
   
6. ❛ I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen. But the meanness usually wins out. ❜
   
7. ❛ I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn’t have loosened. A stitch come undone. ❜
   
8. ❛ Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it. ❜
   
9. ❛ Coffee goes great with sudden death. ❜
   
10. ❛ I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite. ❜
    
11. ❛ “Smile, it can’t be that bad!” Yeah, actually, it can, jackwad. ❜
    
12. ❛ Everything bad in the world already did happen. ❜
    
13. ❛ You’re going to find peace? Like knowing is somehow going to fix you? ❜
    
14. ❛ Instead of asking yourself what happened, just accept that it happened. ❜
    
15. ❛ Homesick for a place I’ve never been. ❜
    
16. ❛ Worries find you easily enough without inviting them. ❜
    
17. ❛ It is always consoling to think of suicide. It’s what gets one through many a bad night. ❜
    
18. ❛ Do you understand this is serious? ❜
    
19. ❛ Sometimes it feels good to fuck with something. Instead of always being fucked with. ❜
    
20. ❛ How could you kill something you cared enough to name? ❜
    
21. ❛ Draw a picture of my soul, and it’d be a scribble with fangs. ❜
    
22. ❛ We have the same chemicals in our blood: shame, anger, greed. Unjustified nostalgia. ❜
    
23. ❛ I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. ❜
    
24. ❛ The phrase fuck you may not rest on the tip of my tongue, but it’s near. Midtongue. ❜
    
25. ❛ Nothing to it but to do it. ❜
    
26. ❛ There are a lot of people who deserve a lesson, deserve to really understand, that nothing comes easy, that most things are going to go sour. ❜
    
27. ❛ If ifs and buts were candies and nuts we’d all have a very Merry Christmas. ❜
    
28. ❛ Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. ❜
    
29. ❛ What does it do to a girl who knows her mother is a murderer? ❜
    
30. ❛ That mean old bitch across the street bit it. ❜

      BOOK STARTERS VOL.39      GIRL, INTERRUPTED       SUSANNA KAYSEN

1. ❛ Survival is a talent. ❜
   
2. ❛ Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. ❜
   
3. ❛ Who has the courage to burn themselves? ❜
   
4. ❛ Is insanity just a matter of dropping the act? ❜
   
5. ❛ Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? ❜
   
6. ❛ You need to be well fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. ❜
   
7. ❛ When I am supposed to be awake, I am asleep; when I am supposed to speak, I am silent. When a pleasure offers itself to me, I avoid it. ❜
   
8. ❛ There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same. ❜
   
9. ❛ In a strange way we are free. We’ve reached the end of the line. We have nothing more to lose. ❜
   
10. ❛ The world won’t stop because we aren’t in it anymore. ❜
    
11. ❛ I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell you is, it’s easy. ❜
    
12. ❛ I am lighter, airier than I’ve been in years. ❜
    
13. ❛ I am not dead, yet something in me definitely is. ❜
    
14. ❛ You meant that as an insult but I am taking it as a compliment. ❜
    
15. ❛ What life can recover from that? ❜
    
16. ❛ It’s a fairly accurate portrait of me. It’s accurate but it isn’t profound. ❜
    
17. ❛ Pull yourself together! There’s nothing wrong with you. ❜
    
18. ❛ It’s quiet. It’s like― I don’t know. It’s like falling off a cliff. ❜
    
19. ❛ Once you start parsing a face, it’s a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots. ❜
    
20. ❛ I lost him. I did it on purpose. ❜
    
21. ❛ It’s a mean world. There’s nobody to take care of you out there. ❜
    
22. ❛ Reality is getting too dense. ❜
    
23. ❛ I’m ambivalent. In fact that’s my new favourite word. ❜
    
24. ❛ I can’t come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions you raise. ❜
    
25. ❛ A spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather. ❜
    
26. ❛ Twenty-five chocolate chip cookies would be the perfect dinner. ❜
    
27. ❛ A thought is a hard thing to control. ❜
    
28. ❛ Life demands skills I don’t have. ❜
    
29. ❛ Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful. Most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them. ❜
    
30. ❛ It never stops, even at night, it’s my lullaby. ❜

       BOOK STARTERS VOL.38        CAT’S EYE       MARGARET ATWOOD

1. ❛ Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. ❜
   
2. ❛ This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes. ❜
   
3. ❛ I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. ❜
   
4. ❛ Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. ❜
   
5. ❛ Hatred is easier. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. ❜
   
6. ❛ Potential has a shelf life. ❜
   
7. ❛ Don’t move. Stay like that, let me have that. ❜
   
8. ❛ I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. ❜
   
9. ❛ Never pray for justice, because you might get some. ❜
   
10. ❛ It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional. ❜
    
11. ❛ We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something. ❜
    
12. ❛ This is what I miss, not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. ❜
    
13. ❛ I am not good. I know too much to be good. I know myself. I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. ❜
    
14. ❛ You are amazing. Amazing and agonising and almost lethal. ❜
    
15. ❛ In my dreams of this city I am always lost. ❜
    
16. ❛ I don’t know where these feelings have come from, I don’t know what I’ve done. ❜
    
17. ❛ I am not the centre of your story, you are.  ❜
    
18. ❛ I’m mad because you’re an asshole. ❜
    
19. ❛ It’s enormously pleasing to me, walking away. It’s like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will. ❜
    
20. ❛ There is never only one of anyone. ❜
    
21. ❛ I can’t do this without feeling I’m acting. ❜
    
22. ❛ I am prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence. ❜
    
23. ❛ I’m losing my appetite for strangers. ❜
    
24. ❛ You wear your cravings on the outside, like the suckers on a squid. You want it all. ❜
    
25. ❛ Knowing too much about other people weakens you. You are forced to understand their reasons for doing things. ❜
    
26. ❛ I have lost confidence: perhaps all I will ever be is what I am now. ❜
    
27. ❛ Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by. ❜
    
28. ❛ Whoever cares the most will lose. ❜
    
29. ❛ Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defences.  ❜
    
30. ❛ Time has gone on without you. ❜

           BOOK STARTERS VOL.57    THE SHINING    STEPHEN KING

1. ❛ Sometimes human places create inhuman monsters. ❜
   
2. ❛ I’m not gonna hurt ya. I’m just going to bash your brains in. ❜
   
3. ❛ Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win. ❜
   
4. ❛ The world’s a hard place. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t hate you and me, but it doesn’t love us, either. ❜
   
5. ❛ The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge. ❜
   
6. ❛ Pull your act together and just go on. ❜
   
7. ❛ I had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there is nothing physically wrong. I hurt all the time. ❜
   
8. ❛ Tough old world, baby. If you’re not bolted together tightly, you’re gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty. ❜
   
9. ❛ Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford? ❜
   
10. ❛ Truth comes out. In the end it always comes out. ❜
    
11. ❛ Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are. ❜
    
12. ❛ No matter where you go, the same asshole gets off the plane. ❜
    
13. ❛ We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives. ❜
    
14. ❛ That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. ❜
    
15. ❛ Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. ❜
    
16. ❛ God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you. ❜
    
17. ❛ Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you. ❜
    
18. ❛ How many times, over how many years, have I—a grown adult—asked for the mercy of another chance? ❜
    
19. ❛ I was suddenly so sick of myself, so revolted. ❜
    
20. ❛ You listen to me. I’m going to talk to you about it this once and never again this same way. ❜
    
21. ❛ But those pieces, they’ll never fit just the same way again. Never in this world. ❜
    
22. ❛ Dying is a part of living. You have to keep tuning in to that if you expect to be a whole person. ❜
    
23. ❛ Officious little prick. ❜
    
24. ❛ I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. — The plants are moving under the rug. ❜
    
25. ❛ How I wish you were fear. ❜
    
26. ❛ But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie. ❜
    
27. ❛ All we have is time, you know. An eternity of time. Or shall we end it? Might as well. After all, we’re missing the party. ❜
    
28. ❛ We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones. ❜
    
29. ❛ The way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. ❜
    
30. ❛ Got to be regular if you want to be happy. ❜

             BOOK STARTERS VOL.56    CIRCE    MADELINE MILLER

1. ❛ But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. ❜
   
2. ❛ He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none. ❜
   
3. ❛ Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. ❜
   
4. ❛ It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment’s carelessness.  ❜
   
5. ❛ If I had ever believed it, I no longer do. ❜
   
6. ❛ I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands. ❜
   
7. ❛ I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ❜
   
8. ❛ I have a better idea. I will do as I please. ❜
   
9. ❛ All my life has been murk and depths, but I am not a part of that dark water. I am a creature within it. ❜
   
10. ❛ You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see. ❜
    
11. ❛ When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world. ❜
    
12. ❛ When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist. ❜
    
13. ❛ But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. ❜
    
14. ❛ I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. ❜
    
15. ❛ This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. ❜
    
16. ❛ You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you. ❜
    
17. ❛ Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. ❜
    
18. ❛ If now I am wise, it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes. ❜
    
19. ❛ You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite. ❜
    
20. ❛ Give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for. ❜
    
21. ❛ I have been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that is only a shape I’ve been poured into. I do not have to keep it. ❜
    
22. ❛ I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. ❜
    
23. ❛ Understanding the world is a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. ❜
    
24. ❛ Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two. ❜
    
25. ❛ The truth is, men make terrible pigs. ❜
    
26. ❛ My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it. ❜
    
27. ❛ This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh. ❜
    
28. ❛ Witches are not so delicate. ❜
    
29. ❛ Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats. ❜
    
30. ❛ I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. ❜

           BOOK STARTERS VOL.55    MADDADDAM    MARGARET ATWOOD

1. ❛ There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too. ❜
   
2. ❛ The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them. ❜
   
3. ❛ Life is warped. I’m just in sync. ❜
   
4. ❛ Now it’s a whisper from the past. ❜
   
5. ❛ But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you’ve had a little, you start shaking if you don’t get more. ❜
   
6. ❛ Why is it always such a surprise? The moon. Even though we know it’s coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush. ❜
   
7. ❛ Perfection exacts a price, but it’s the imperfect who pay it. ❜
   
8. ❛ What is ‘belief’ but a willingness to suspend the negatives?  ❜
   
9. ❛ I have scars, inside me. ❜
   
10. ❛ The dead are not entirely dead but are alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. ❜
    
11. ❛ However dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void. ❜
    
12. ❛ Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic. ❜
    
13. ❛ It is another way of saying tough luck. To people you aren’t going to help out. ❜
    
14. ❛ I’m waiting, far off in the future. ❜
    
15. ❛ The only sure camouflage is unpredictability. ❜
    
16. ❛ There are so many of them, and each one of them is doing part of the killing, whether they know it or not. ❜
    
17. ❛ First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled. ❜
    
18. ❛ I long to swim in liquid moonlight. ❜
    
19. ❛ That’s right, I don’t like to be summoned on trivial matters. ❜
    
20. ❛ The part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. ❜
    
21. ❛ Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew. ❜
    
22. ❛ Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot. ❜
    
23. ❛ At last. It’s you. ❜
    
24. ❛ No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish. ❜
    
25. ❛ Take what the moment offers. Don’t close doors. Be thankful. ❜
    
26. ❛ How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. ❜
    
27. ❛ Is it disapproval or extreme lust? With some men it’s hard to tell the difference. ❜
    
28. ❛ My hair was driving me crazy, but then … I died. ❜
    
29. ❛ Seek and ye shall find, eventually. And you found. You’re right, I don’t dispute that. Sorry. ❜
    
30. ❛ Everything digests, and is digested. ❜

         BOOK STARTERS VOL.54    THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW    A.J. FINN

1. ❛ My head was once a filing cabinet. Now it’s a flurry of papers, floating on a draft. ❜
   
2. ❛ You cannot keep bumping your head against reality and saying it is not there. ❜
   
3. ❛ I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about. ❜
   
4. ❛ And if I don’t want to die, I’ve got to start living. ❜
   
5. ❛ The world is a beautiful place. Don’t forget that. And don’t miss it. ❜
   
6. ❛ I was fighting for my life. So I must not want to die. ❜
   
7. ❛ Something’s happening to me, through me, something dangerous and new. ❜
   
8. ❛ It’s taken root, a poison tree; it’s grown, fanning out, vines winding round my gut, my lungs, my heart. ❜
   
9. ❛ We’re interpreters. We’re translators. ❜
   
10. ❛ You’ll notice I’m not asking what made you this way. ❜
    
11. ❛ No family, happy or unhappy, is quite like any other. Tolstoy was chock-fullo’shit. Remember that. ❜
    
12. ❛ We lived in monochrome those nights. ❜
    
13. ❛ You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? ❜
    
14. ❛ Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you’d find swine? ❜
    
15. ❛ I stand here in the dark: cold, utterly alone, full of fear and something that feels like longing. ❜
    
16. ❛ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results. ❜
    
17. ❛ Not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye. ❜
    
18. ❛ Selective emotional detachment. ❜
    
19. ❛ Not for me, or at least not today. ❜
    
20. ❛ Dead but not gone, watching life surge forward around me, powerless to intervene. ❜
    
21. ❛ Do I sound like a hillbilly saying that? ❜
    
22. ❛ Remember, you’ve got your secret weapon. ❜
    
23. ❛ The dream drains away like water. The memory, really. I try to scoop it up in my palms, but it’s gone. ❜
    
24. ❛ My shadow stretches along the carpet, as though trying to detach itself from me. ❜
    
25. ❛ It curls away from me, like blood in water. ❜
    
26. ❛ It’s been so long since I felt the rain. Or wind—the caress of wind. ❜
    
27. ❛ But snow I never want to feel again. ❜
    
28. ❛ Through adversity to the stars. ❜
    
29. ❛ No hero. No sleuth. I am locked in. I am locked out. ❜
30. ❛ Thinking hasn’t gotten me anywhere so far. ❜
    

        BOOK STARTERS VOL.53    THE DIVINE COMEDY    DANTE ALIGHIERI

1. ❛ All hope abandon, ye who enter here. ❜
   
2. ❛ The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain. ❜
   
3. ❛ The love that moves the sun and the other stars. ❜
   
4. ❛ The devil is not as black as he is painted. ❜
   
5. ❛ Through me you pass into the city of woe. Through me you pass into eternal pain. ❜
   
6. ❛ Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice.  ❜
   
7. ❛ There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery. ❜
   
8. ❛ Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. ❜
   
9. ❛ Without hope we live on in desire. ❜
   
10. ❛ Make my veins and pulses tremble. ❜
    
11. ❛ I did not die, and yet I lost life’s breath. ❜
    
12. ❛ I found myself within a forest dark. ❜
    
13. ❛ If the present world go astray, the cause is in you, in you it is to be sought. ❜
    
14. ❛ Here were every fruit and never-ending spring. ❜
    
15. ❛ The well heeded well heard. ❜
    
16. ❛ Through me the way that runs among the lost. ❜
    
17. ❛ A longer ladder still is to be climbed. ❜
    
18. ❛ Why should you care about what’s whispered here? ❜
    
19. ❛ Why have you let your mind get so entwined? ❜
    
20. ❛ I was told about this torture, that it was the hell of carnal sins when reasons give way to desire. ❜
    
21. ❛ What is it then? Why do you hesitate? ❜
    
22. ❛ Why do you relish living like a coward? ❜
    
23. ❛ A just request is to be met in silence, by the act. ❜
    
24. ❛ There was not, nor will be, from the first day to the last night, an act so glorious and so magnificent. ❜
    
25. ❛ Your name is widely known in hell! ❜
    
26. ❛ Oh human creatures, born to soar aloft, why fall ye thus before a little wind? ❜
    
27. ❛ That brute which knows no peace came ever nearer me and, step by step, drove me back down to where the sun is mute. ❜
    
28. ❛ The shining strengthened me against the fright whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart through all the terrors of that piteous night. ❜
    
29. ❛ It was so dark, and deep, and clouded, that I could see nothing by staring into its depths. ❜
    
30. ❛ Love rules me. It determines what I ask. ❜

          BOOK STARTERS VOL.52    SHARP OBJECTS    GILLIAN FLYNN

1. ❛ The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you. ❜
   
2. ❛ Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. ❜
   
3. ❛ Women get consumed. ❜
   
4. ❛ Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them. ❜
   
5. ❛ A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort. ❜
   
6. ❛ Safer to be feared than loved. ❜
   
7. ❛ I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence. ❜
   
8. ❛ It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying. ❜
   
9. ❛ I always feel sad for the girl that I was. ❜
   
10. ❛ Every time people said I was pretty, I thought of everything ugly swarming beneath my clothes. ❜
    
11. ❛ How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. ❜
    
12. ❛ See, there I am. I told you I lived. I told you I was. ❜
    
13. ❛ Sometimes I think I won’t ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand. ❜
    
14. ❛ To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting. ❜
    
15. ❛ I’m here. I don’t usually feel that I am. ❜
    
16. ❛ I’m tired of dying. ❜
    
17. ❛ What if you hurt because it feels so good? ❜
    
18. ❛ How confusing to live in the shadow of a shadow. ❜
    
19. ❛ Do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them? You can’t do anything, you just have to wait? ❜
    
20. ❛ Sometimes my scars have a mind of their own. ❜
    
21. ❛ Everyone has their own version of a memory. ❜
    
22. ❛ Isn’t a smile a girl’s best weapon? ❜
    
23. ❛ My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past. ❜
    
24. ❛ Do what I want; I might like you. ❜
    
25. ❛ I feel sorry for Persephone because even when she’s back with the living, people are afraid of her because of where’s she’s been. ❜
    
26. ❛ She has never told me she loved me, and I never assumed she did. ❜
    
27. ❛ The sight of it actually does something to you, makes you less human. ❜
    
28. ❛ It infects you. It ruined me. ❜
    
29. ❛ Your health is not a debt you just cancel. The body collects. ❜
    
30. ❛ Men love to put things inside women, don’t they? ❜

           BOOK STARTERS VOL.51    WAR AND PEACE    LEO TOLSTOY

1. ❛ We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. ❜
   
2. ❛ Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women. ❜
   
3. ❛ The strongest of all warriors are these two — time and patience. ❜
   
4. ❛ If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. ❜
   
5. ❛ There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. ❜
   
6. ❛ The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness. ❜
   
7. ❛ Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy. ❜
   
8. ❛ It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong. ❜
   
9. ❛ You can love a person dear to you with a human love, but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. ❜
   
10. ❛ If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, then all possibility of life is destroyed. ❜
    
11. ❛ We are asleep until we fall in love! ❜
    
12. ❛ I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. ❜
    
13. ❛ Everything I know, I know because of love. ❜
    
14. ❛ Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. ❜
    
15. ❛ If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself. ❜
    
16. ❛ Yes, love, but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, I saw my enemy and yet loved him. ❜
    
17. ❛ How can one be well…when one suffers morally? ❜
    
18. ❛ Kings are the slaves of history. ❜
    
19. ❛ God is the same everywhere. ❜
    
20. ❛ Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy. ❜
    
21. ❛ One must be cunning and wicked in this world. ❜
    
22. ❛ We love people not so much for the good they’ve done us, as for the good we’ve done them. ❜
    
23. ❛ When one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep over one’s hair! ❜
    
24. ❛ For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed? ❜
    
25. ❛ He did what heroes do after their work is accomplished; he died. ❜
    
26. ❛ Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps. ❜
    
27. ❛ Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible. ❜
    
28. ❛ The distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. ❜
    
29. ❛ How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? ❜
    
30. ❛ The wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe. ❜

          BOOK STARTERS VOL.50    SMOKE AND MIRRORS    NEIL GAIMAN

1. ❛ When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. ❜
   
2. ❛ My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: the parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely. ❜
   
3. ❛ Would it be worse to love someone who is no longer there, or not to love someone who is? ❜
   
4. ❛ Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness. ❜
   
5. ❛ It is not that I was credulous, simply that I believed in all things dark and dangerous. ❜
   
6. ❛ Sometimes you do things you regret, but there’s nothing you can do about them. Times change. Doors close behind you. You move on. ❜
   
7. ❛ Love will be an impulse that will inspire and ruin in equal measure. ❜
   
8. ❛ He died alone. It don’t matter a rat’s ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone. ❜
   
9. ❛ It was love, I knew, and it tasted like champagne in my mind. ❜
   
10. ❛ The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being averted, by love or foolishness or just plain old dumb luck. ❜
    
11. ❛ She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble. ❜
    
12. ❛ Daylight is always safe. ❜
    
13. ❛ If not for death, they’d be content to simply exist, but with death, well, their lives will have meaning. ❜
    
14. ❛ You want to know the future, love? Then wait. ❜
    
15. ❛ There are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm. ❜
    
16. ❛ Fairy tales are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated ❜
    
17. ❛ But sometimes you leave blood on your instruments. ❜
    
18. ❛ I’d like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests. ❜
    
19. ❛ You’ve seen them. They have mouths that twitch, and eyes that stare, and they babble and they mewl and they whimper. ❜
    
20. ❛ They are not mad, or rather, the loss of their sanity is the lesser of their problems. ❜
    
21. ❛ Good a reason for writing as I know: releasing demons, letting them fly. ❜
    
22. ❛ That miserable state in which everything seems flat and of equal importance; when nothing matters, and in which reality seems scraped thin and threadbare. ❜
    
23. ❛ Someone had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the metal: JUST DIE, it said. Like it is easy. ❜
    
24. ❛ Winter started today. The sky turned grey and the snow began to fall and it did not stop falling until well after dark. ❜
    
25. ❛ Memory is the great deceiver. ❜

           BOOK STARTERS VOL.49      EMMA     JANE AUSTEN

1. ❛ Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. ❜
   
2. ❛ I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.  ❜
   
3. ❛ If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. ❜
   
4. ❛ I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other. ❜
   
5. ❛ But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. ❜
   
6. ❛ I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other would have borne it. ❜
   
7. ❛ There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves. ❜
   
8. ❛ One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. ❜
   
9. ❛ Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. ❜
   
10. ❛ You must be the best judge of your own happiness. ❜
    
11. ❛ Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing ; but I have never been in love ; it is not my way, or my nature ; and I do not think I ever shall. ❜
    
12. ❛ Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise. ❜
    
13. ❛ If I have not spoken, it is because I am afraid I will awaken myself from this dream. ❜
    
14. ❛ If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. ❜
    
15. ❛ Faultless in spite of all her faults. ❜
    
16. ❛ A heroine whom no one but myself will much like. ❜
    
17. ❛ There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart. ❜
    
18. ❛ Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its fragrance on the desert air. ❜
    
19. ❛ I pity you. I thought you cleverer. ❜
    
20. ❛ Evil to some is always good to others. ❜
    
21. ❛ I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. ❜
    
22. ❛ She is loveliness itself. ❜
    
23. ❛ Time does not compose me. ❜
    
24. ❛ A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her. ❜
    
25. ❛ I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice. ❜
    
26. ❛ I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be any more. ❜
    
27. ❛ I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment. ❜
    
28. ❛ I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed. ❜
    
29. ❛ With all your little faults, you are an excellent creature. ❜
    
30. ❛ You have another long walk before you. ❜

     BOOK STARTERS VOL.48    NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS    ANGELA CARTER

1. ❛ The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. ❜
   
2. ❛ What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? ❜
   
3. ❛ Out of the frying pan into the fire! ❜
   
4. ❛ We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity. ❜
   
5. ❛ She sleeps. And now she wakes each day a little less. ❜
   
6. ❛ And, oh, God … how frequently I weep! ❜
   
7. ❛ From the coffin of your madness there is no escape. ❜
   
8. ❛ I am feeling supernatural tonight. I want to eat diamonds. ❜
   
9. ❛ All the same there is a chance that if we keep on shaking our chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles will part. ❜
   
10. ❛ It was sad music fit to make you cut your throat. ❜
    
11. ❛ Nothing is more boring than being forced to play. ❜
    
12. ❛ Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest? ❜
    
13. ❛ Wherein does a woman’s honour reside? In her vagina or in her spirit? ❜
    
14. ❛ Perhaps…I could not be content with mere contentment! ❜
    
15. ❛ Have you ever stared stark failure in the face? The trick is to outstare it. ❜
    
16. ❛ Sometimes it seems that the faces exist of themselves, in a disembodied somewhere, waiting for the one who will wear them, who will bring them to life. ❜
    
17. ❛ I have the febrile gaiety of a being without a past, without a present, yet I exist. ❜
    
18. ❛ I felt myself turning, willy-nilly, from a woman into an idea. ❜
    
19. ❛ She looks wonderful, but she doesn’t look right. ❜
    
20. ❛ The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind. ❜
    
21. ❛ I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs! ❜
    
22. ❛ I love to hear my bones rattle. That’s how I know I’m alive. ❜
    
23. ❛ I learnt, first, as the birds do, from the birds. ❜
    
24. ❛ Inside and outside match exactly, but both are badly wrong. ❜
    
25. ❛ During the less-than-blink of time it took the last chime to die, there came a vertiginous sensation. ❜
    
26. ❛ I fear a wound not of the body but the soul, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind. ❜
    
27. ❛ I fear the proof of my own singularity. ❜
    
28. ❛ Still nothing could calm the fearful storm in my erupting skin. ❜
    
29. ❛ Petersburg, loveliest of all hallucinations. ❜
    
30. ❛ A breathless second between black forest and the frozen sea. ❜

           BOOK STARTERS VOL.47    TRAINSPOTTING    IRVINE WELSH

1. ❛ We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we’re all going to die, without really finding out the big answers. ❜
   
2. ❛ By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be. ❜
   
3. ❛ I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. ❜
   
4. ❛ And the reasons? There are no reasons. ❜
   
5. ❛ Love does not exist, it’s like religion, made to control you. ❜
   
6. ❛ After all, we’re not fucking stupid. At least, we’re not that fucking stupid. ❜
   
7. ❛ You fucking knew that fucking cunt would fuck some cunt. ❜
   
8. ❛ Everything in the street today seems soft focus. ❜
   
9. ❛ What does that make us? The lowest of the low. ❜
   
10. ❛ Take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you’re still fuckin’ miles off the pace. ❜
    
11. ❛ It’s as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the way things are in a dream. ❜
    
12. ❛ It’s all okay, it’s all beautiful; but I fear that this internal sea is going to subside soon, leaving this poisonous shite washed up, stranded up in my body. ❜
    
13. ❛ It cuts me up. It confuses me. ❜
    
14. ❛ It’s not funny laughter. This is lynch mob laughter. ❜
    
15. ❛ Protect me from those who wish to help us. ❜
    
16. ❛ They mean well, and they mean well to me, but there’s no way under the sun that they can appreciate what I feel, what I need. ❜
    
17. ❛ The pit of melancholy is a bottomless one, and I am descending fast. ❜
    
18. ❛ Living like this is a full-time business. ❜
    
19. ❛ I’ll stand or fall alone. ❜
    
20. ❛ We are no wiser now than at the start. ❜
    
21. ❛ This is pathetic, and fucking boring. ❜
    
22. ❛ Death is usually a process, rather than an event. ❜
    
23. ❛ We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? ❜
    
24. ❛ We are all acquaintances now. ❜
    
25. ❛ The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads of poisonous flotsam and jetsam. ❜
    
26. ❛ Life is beautiful. I’m going to enjoy it, and I’m going to have a long life. ❜
    
27. ❛ The grim reality of impending death can be talked away by trying to invest in the present reality of life. ❜
    
28. ❛ There must be more to life than this. ❜
    
29. ❛ We all see what we want to see. ❜
    
30. ❛ Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to be killed by a member of your own family or a close friend, than by anyone else. ❜