Thursday Quotables: The Returned

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week. Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

This week’s Thursday Quotable — short but sweet:

His father’s love was an open door. It would never close — neither to keep you out nor to keep you in.

Source: The Returned
Author: Jason Mott
Harlequin MIRA, 2013

The Returned

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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21Aug2013

Thursday Quotables: The Humans

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Welcome back to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week. Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

If you’d like to participate, it’s really simple:

Follow Bookshelf Fantasies, if you please!
Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now.
Comment on this post with the link to your own Thursday Quotables post.
Make sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com).
Or… have a quote to share but not a blog post? Leave your quote in the comments!
Have fun!

This week’s Thursday Quotable:

I know that some of you reading this are convinced humans are a myth, but I am here to state that they do actually exist.

And a bit further on:

Magazines are very popular, despite no human’s ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to a feeling of needing to buy something, which the humans then do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next.

Source: The Humans
Author: Matt Haig
Simon & Schuster, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Link up or share your quote of the week in the comments.

14Aug2013

Thursday Quotables: The Cuckoo’s Calling

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week’s Thursday Quotable:

The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road, the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top floor from which the body had fallen.

Source: The Cuckoo’s Calling
Author: Robert Galbraith
Mulholland Books, 2013

Now that’s an opening that makes you want to keep reading!!

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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7Aug2013

Thursday Quotables: When You Were Here / Openly Straight

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week, I’m featuring two different passages from two different books — one that made my heart ache, and one that put a smile on my face.

Thursday Quotable #1:

My body is filled with complete emptiness and complete longing at the same time, only there’s not enough space in me for both, so they fight and argue and run masking tape down my middle to divide me.

Source: When You Were Here
Author: Daisy Whitney
Little, Brown and Company, 2013

Thursday Quotable #2:

If it were up to my dad, my entire life would be on video.

Anything I do, he grabs his phone. “Opal,” he’ll yell to my mother, “Rafe is eating corn flakes. We gotta get this on film.”

Source: Openly Straight
Author: Bill Konigsberg
Arthur A. Levine Books, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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31Jul2013

Thursday Quotables: Out of the Easy

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week’s Thursday Quotable:

We walked up St. Peter to Royal, back toward the shop. Neither of us spoke. We moved through the afterbirth of celebration, kicking cans and cups out of the way, stepping over pieces of costumes that had been abandoned through the course of the evening. Jesse grabbed a string of milky glass beads hanging from a doorway. He handed them to me, and I put them over my head. The day had a peace about it, like Christmas, when the world stops and gives permission to pause. All over the city, Orleanians were at rest, asleep in their makeup, beads in their beds.

In case you ever wondered what New Orleans was like the morning after Mardi Gras…

Source: Out of the Easy
Author: Ruta Sepetys
Philomel Books, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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24Jul2013

Thursday Quotables: The Book of Secrets

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week’s Thursday Quotable:

“Right, okay, but that’s not the point. Don’t you ever want to, you know, escape? Like Holden tried to do, just pick up and leave without telling anybody where you’re going? We could go and never come back if we wanted. Imagine us living in a little town in Tuscany, a two-room cottage with a flagstone path and flowers in all the windows; we’d spend all day writing novels, and then in the afternoon we’d take walks and go out to cheese shops for gorgonzola.”

I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the dream of leaving had been brewing in Nate ever since I first met him. “You’re turning us into a chapter of A Room with a View,” I said, but when I thought of all the times I’d imagined visiting Hemingway’s Spain or Austen’s English countryside, Lewis’s Narnia or Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I could see the drive to leave for somewhere better had always been inside me too. All the best stories in the world were of escape.

Source: The Book of Secrets
Author: Elizabeth Joy Arnold
Bantam Books, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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17Jul2013

Thursday Quotables: Gorgeous

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week’s Thursday Quotable:

By now I’d met tons of celebrities and almost none of them came even close to matching their magazine covers or baseball cards or ads for vitamin-infused bottled water. Queen Catherine, however, looked exactly and only like herself and I wanted to pull out a five-pound note and hold it up to her face just to check, and marvel at, the similarity and the Queen’s lack of vanity. She’d refused to have her nation’s money Photoshopped.

And one more, because I just can’t resist:

“The Crown Jewels,” said the prince, “and I don’t know why, but every time I say that I feel I should be unzipping my fly.”

LOL. This book cracks me up.

Source: Gorgeous
Author: Paul Rudnick
Scholastic Press, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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10Jul2013

Thursday Quotables: Joyland

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week’s Thursday Quotable:

By early September, Heaven Beach was almost completely deserted, which suited my mood. That fall was the most beautiful of my life. Even forty years later I can say that. And I was never so unhappy, I can say that, too. People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You’ve heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What’s so sweet about that?

Source: Joyland
Author: Stephen King
Hard Case Crime/Titan Publishing, 2013

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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3Jul2013

Thursday Quotables: A Small Death in the Great Glen

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week’s Thursday Quotable:

Joanne went into a dwam*, floating with the gull. Floating over the castle braes, over the river, across to the cathedral without a single wing movement, he (for it always seemed a him to her) drifted on toward the infirmary, back over to the war memorial, disappearing into the tangle of the Islands.

She could feel herself nestling into the shoulders of the gull, oily satin-smooth feathers smelling of fish. Up into the thermals they floated, taking in the river, the town, the hills, the mountains, the Great Glen, the faultline that fractured the Highlands. Peaks and scree-strewn ridgelines were mirrored in the ribbon of deep dark lochs. Glens clad in a faded tartan of heather and bracken with splashes of green outlining abandoned crofts emptied by the Clearances** were cut deep by drunken burns and rivers. A fierce and stunning landscape; it made Joanne want to sing.

*Dwam: Scottish term for “daydream” or “reverie”.

**The Highland Clearances. See Wikipedia for info.

Source: A Small Death in the Great Glen
Author: A. D. Scott
Atria, 2010

Sigh. I just love this description of the Scottish Highlands — one of my dream destinations!

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

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19Jun2013

Thursday Quotables: Fathomless

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

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This week’s Thursday Quotable:

I sigh involuntarily when the first wave brushes around my feet, soothing the pain. Another step, another, and with each one I feel better — like I was sick and I’m being healed. When I get thigh-deep, an especially large wave crashes in front of me. It almost knocks me backward, sweeps me back to the shore, but then it’s perfect, it’s beautiful, it holds me like it loves me. I fall forward, and the water envelops me, swirls my hair around me like a blanket. There’s no pain. There’s nothing but simplicity, nothing but beauty as I slip away from the shore and dive deep, deep into the ocean, into the silence, into the cool water and the smooth sand that coats the ocean floor.

Source: Fathomless
Author: Jackson Pearce
Hachette Book Group, 2012

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

Note for Thursday Quotables participants: This and other weekly features at Bookshelf Fantasies will be on a wee break next week. (Woo hoo, it’s vacation time!) Check back in two weeks for the next Thursday Quotables!

Link up, or share your quote of the week in the comments.