Book Club Fiction Quotes

“At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?”
― Fredrik Backman, Britt-Marie Was Here

“There are some wounds unreachable by words, some sins immune to apology.”
― Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time

“Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Before We Visit the Goddess

“The girl I’d been just an hour ago was gone; she’d been obliterated. I had no idea who I was, now.”
― Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time

“I felt numb, I felt empty. I was a shell, an abandoned chrysalis, a tomb lying in wait for the dead”
― Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time

“Maybe he was too drunk to hear me when I told him to stop. Maybe I didn’t say it loudly enough. Maybe I didn’t say it enough times.”
― Amy Hatvany, It Happens All the Time

“The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind.”
― C. Lynn Murphy, The First Noble Truth

“And now she must continue the day as if the strange dream hadn’t picked up her life and shaken it upside down like a snow globe, dislodging everything that wasn’t glued down."
The Dream Jumper's Promise”
― Kim Hornsby

“A sudden change took place. From lying back in her seat wreathed in her own thoughts, which often gave her an otherworldly quality, Grace actually raised her head, and looked straight at him for the first time.
--Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia”
― Cynthia Sally Haggard, Farewell My Life: Buona Notte Vita Mia

“It was strange letting her body do such things, while her mind hovered outside somewhere, just on the outside of her skull. Strange for things to be fuzzy, always out of reach, whether doorknobs or flowers or her own baby. She was no longer intact or in control.”
― Sarah Beth Martin, The One True Ocean

“Thoughtful, innovative, this mother was; she always had the solution. So on the stickiest of nights, when the varnished wood chairs sweated and moths panted against my window screen, I would crawl into my smooth white bed of ice cream.”
― Sarah Beth Martin, The One True Ocean

“Every morning we are born again.
What we do today is
what matters most!' ~ Buddha”
― Olivia Barry