Some of my favorite quotes from books I've read:
This Charming Man, by Marian Keyes:
"The back windows looked out over the fields, then the Atlantic, maybe a hundred yards away. Actually, I'm just making that bit up. I had no idea how far away the sea was. Only men could do things like that. "Half a mile." "Fifty yards." Giving directions, that sort of thing. I could look at a woman and say "Thirty-six C." Or "Let's try it in the next size up." But I had no idea how far away Tim's sea was except that I wouldn't want to walk to it in high heels."
Welcome to the Great Mysterious, by Lorna Landvik
"The trouble with you, Geneva, is you want to have your cake and eat it too."
"Isn't that what cake is for? To eat?"
"Ann had thoughtfully stocked the bathroom with pink, green, and blue bottles whose labels promised to either soothe and condition, energzie and revitalize, or relax and pamper. I chose the last of these -- I respond to anything that includes the word pamper."
"The sun was as flirty as Scarlett O'Hara with the Tarleton twins, breaking through the clouds in spectacular bursts that seemd like personal favors and then retreating for hours, days, and making us all ache for just a glimpse."
"....but I'm not sure about me. I want to get married, but what if no one wants to marry me? Miss Merserau - she's special ed - she says sometimes Down syndrome people aren't mature enough to get married."
I felt tears well in my eyes, but then Rich, surprising me, laughed.
"What's so funny?"
Conrad said, 'Just for that, Miss Merserau, we won't invite you to Rich's wedding.'"
B is for Burglar, by Sue Grafton
"I figure guys are like Whitman's Samplers. I like to take a little bite out of each and then move on before the whole box gets stale."
"...There was a woman behind me, changing the diaper on one of those oversized babies who looks like a solemn adult with flushed cheeks. The child kept his eyes pinned on me gravely while his mother attended to him. Sometimes cats look at me that way, as though we're foreign agents sending silent signals to one another in an out of the way meeting place.
The Other Side of the Story, by Marian Keyes
"I never wear flats. My shoes are so high that sometimes when I step out of them, people look around in confusion and ask, "Where'd she go?" and I have to say, "I'm down here.""
"It's the weirdest thing, making a 999 call--I'd only ever done it once before. Anton had had badly bad hiccups and I'd been very drunk. (Actually so had he, it was the reason for his hiccups.) We'd tried everything to stop them; cold key down his back; drinking from the wrong side of the glass; looking at his bank statement to see just how overdrawn he was."
"I am different when my nails are done. I am more dynamic. I gesticulate more, I am better at scaring my staff. I can indicate impatience by drumming on tabletops and I can wrap up a meeting with a few choice clatters."
"What's your favorite phrase?
What doesn't kill us makes us funnier."
"(Dad did not exactly live in a fantasy world, but he was a regular visitor.)"
"... I am more of an ambler. I once overheard my old boss in Dublin describe me as very "hello trees, hello flowers." It was intended as an insult and it fulfilled its brief; I was insulted. I had little interest in greeting trees and flowers but nor did I treat life as a treadmill, on which it was vital to keep fleeing forward in order to avoid being sucked off the back and out of the game."
"And of course Lesley had a tiny handbag - confirming my theory that the richer the person, the smaller their handbag. Like, what do they need? Their Gold Card, the keys to the Audi TT, a tiny mobile and a Juicy Tube. Me, my handbag is the size of an air hostess's wheely case full of work files, makeup, leaking pens, dry cleaning tickets, half-eaten cereal bars, solpadeine, diet Coke, In Style, and of course my brick of a phone."
"Seriously, we have two credit cards. Which are not up to their limits. I don't know about you, but I'm never comfortable with a credit card that isn't at it's limit. I get that nagging feeling, like I've left the gas on..."
"Her phenomenal pessimism led by example and encouraged my own pessimism to walk tall through every aspect of my life. She provided precisely the right environment to enable me to see the full extent of the wreckage."
"I knew that one day my life would be entirely different; full of feelings and friends and laughter and color and with an almost entirely new cast to the one currently peopling it."
The Weight of Water, by Anita Shreve
"... I remain quite certain that souls which take root in a particular geography cannot be successfully transplanted. I believe that these roots, these tiny fibrous filaments, will almost inevitably dry and wither in the new soil, or will send the plant into sudden and irretrieveable shock."
"A crime of passion," Rich says.
"A crime of passion?" Adaline narrows her eyes. "In the end, a crime of passion is just sordid, isn't it? At heart. We think a crime of passion has a morality all its own -- people have thought so for years. History is full of judgments that forgive crimes of passion. But it doesn't have a morality, not really. It's pure selfishness. Simply having what you want."
"I think it's the knife that makes it seem like a crime of passion," says Thomas. "It was a knife, wasn't it?"
"An ax."
"Same thing. It's the intimacy. With a gun, you can kill a person at a distance. But with a knife, you have to touch the victim - more than touch. Manhandle. Subdue. It would seem to require, at least for the several seconds it takes to complete the deed, a sustained frenzy or passion."
"Or a lucrative contract," says Rich."
Eclipse, by Stephenie Meyer
"The urge to fight must be a defining characteristic of the Y chromosome. They were all the same."
