#ad

The good die young, but I have been spared to build myself up so that I may end my life as good as gold. The senior dead will be proud of me.... I will join the Y.M.C.A. of the immortals. Only, in this very hour, I may be missing eternity. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#senior-dead #y-m-c-a-of-the-immortals #life

I loved you!" he yelled. He jumped up out of his chair so quickly I never saw it coming. "I loved you, and you destroyed me. You took my heart and ripped it up. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#love

Reputations seldom deliver on promises of happiness. ↗

— Huston Piner

#romance #ya #young-adult #life

This life is a shadowy thing, lad. We live in a crowded space of lights and shadows, and when left to ourselves, we all too often fail to see the brightest light of all. ↗

— James Michael Pratt

#light #shadows #life

To die would be an awfully big adventure. ↗

— J.M. Barrie

#love #love

Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#forster #life #philosophy #where-angels-fear-to-tread #life

It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in which good triumphs against cynicism and dispair. That was what she wanted, but she was aware of the fact that one did not publicise the fact too widely, certainly not in sophisticated circles. Such circles wanted complexity, dysfunction and irony: there was no room for joy, celebration or pathos. But where was the FUN in that? ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#art

A person can have a happy and fulfilling life without children. ↗

— Judy Blume

#children #life

The point of reading is not reading but living. Reading helps you live with greater appreciation, keener insight and heightened emotional awareness. ↗

— Steve Leveen

#life

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic. Actually she had heard this phrase, the republic of letters, used before, at graduation ceremonies, honorary degrees and the like, though without knowing quite what it meant. At that time talk of a republic of any sort she had thought mildly insulting and in her actual presence tactless to say the least. It was only now she understood what it meant. Books did not defer. All readers were equal and this took her back to the beginning of her life. As a girl, one of her greatest thrills had been on VE night when she and her sister had slipped out of the gates and mingled unrecognised with the crowds. There was something of that, she felt, to reading. It was anonymous; it was shared; it was common. And she who had led a life apart now found that she craved it. Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognised. ↗

— Alan Bennett

#equality