#1 the alchemist by paul coelho

• "...and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And that's where the power of love comes in. Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are." (p 151)

#2 m. butterfly by david henry hwang

• "I knew this little flower was waiting for me to call, and, as I wickedly refused to do so, I felt for the first time that rush of power -- the absolute power of a man." (p 32)
• "When a woman calls a man her 'friend,' she's calling him a eunuch or homosexual." (p 35)
• "God who creates Eve to serve Adam, who blesses Solomon with his harem but ties Jezebel to a burning bed -- that God is a man." (p 38)
• "The Orientals are people too. They want the good things we can give them. If the Americans demonstrate the will to win, the Vietnamese will welcome them into a mutually beneficial union."(p 46)
• "Now I see -- we are always most revolted by the things hidden within us." (p 59)
• "I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy." (p 64)
• "Rule Two: As soon as a Western man comes into contact with the East -- he's already confused. The West has sort of an international rape mentality towards the East. ... Basically, 'Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes.' The West thinks of itself as masculine -- big guns, big industry, big money -- so the East is feminine -- weak, delicate, poor...but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom -- the feminine mystique. Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated -- because a woman can't think for herself. ... You expect Oriental countries to submit to your guns, and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men." (p 83)

#3 murder in mesopotamia by agatha christie

#4 earthborn by sylvia waugh

• "But his imagination went far beyond hers. His vision of Ormingat was spiritual; hers was physical and somehow false." (p 34)
• "But you'll find in life that it is not always possible to avoid being hurt. People are always being faced with choices. The only thing to do, I think, is to bear the hurt and hope for better things." (p 185)
• "_I have a broken heart._ It seemed to her that her heart had turned brittle and shattered into sharp pieces, crunching into themselves like glass, inflicting terrible pain on her rib cage. And it was true. Where her heart should have been there was the deepest hurt." (p 209)
• "He had a right to his own opinion, after all, and he felt happy to express it, even though in this story he is a man without a name." (p 261)
• "'We are all visitors to this Earth,' she said. 'We won't any of us live here forever.'" (p 263)

#5 interpreter of maladies by jhumpa lahiri

• "It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. They ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands. Like my parents, Mr. Pirzada took off his shoes before entering a room, chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for dessert dipped austere biscuits into successive cups of tea. ... 'Mr. Pirzada is Bengali, but he is a Muslim,' my father informed me. 'Therefore he lives in East Pakistan, not India.'" [_When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine_, p 25-26]
• "Pakistan was yellow, not orange. I noticed that there were two distinct parts to it, one much larger than the other, separated by an expanse of Indian territory; it was as if California and Connecticut constituted a nation apart from the U.S." [_When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine_, p 26]
• "'We live here now, she was born here.' She seemed genuinely proud of the fact, as if it were a reflection of my character. In her estimation, I knew, I was assured a safe life, an easy life, a fine education, every opportunity. I would never have to eat rationed food, or obey curfews, or watch riots from my rooftop, or hide neighbors in water tanks to prevent them from being shot, as she and my father had." [_When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine_, p 26-27]
• "'But what does she learn about the world?' My father rattled the cashew can in his hand. 'What is she learning?' We learned American history, of course, and American geography. That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, adn we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed." [_When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine_, p 27]
• "What they heard that evening, and for many evenings after that, was that India and Pakistan were drawing closer and closer to war. Troops from both sides lined the border, and Dacca was insisting on nothing short of independence. The war was to be waged on East Pakistani soil. The United States was siding with West Pakistan, the Soviet Union with Indian and what was soon to be Bangladesh. War was declared officially on December 4, and twelve days later, the Pakistani army, weakened by having to fight three thousand miles from their source of supplies, surrendered in Dacca. All of these facts I know only now, for they are available to me in any history book, in any library. But then it remained, for the most part, a remote mystery with haphazard clues. What I remember during those twelve days of the war was that my father no longer asked me to watch the news with them, and that Mr. Pirzada stopped bringing me candy, and that my mother refused to serve anything other than boiled eggs with rice for dinner. I remember some nights helping my mother spread a sheet and blankets on the couch so that Mr. Pirzada could sleep there, and high-pitched voices hollering in the middle of the night when my parents called our relatives in Calcutta to learn more details about the situation. Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear." [_When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine_, p 40-41]
• "It was there, after performing a series of blood tests, that the doctor in charge of Bibi's case, exasperated, concluded that a marriage would cure her." [_The Treatment of Bibi Haldar_, p 161]
• "So we drive to Cambridge to visit him, or bring him home for a weekend, so that he can eat rice with us with his hands, and speak in Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after we die." [_The Third and Final Continent_, p 197]
• "Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." [_The Third and Final Continent_, p 197-198]