Quiet

• “Before you measure the years, you measure the days. And before the days, you measure the moon.”
• “Introverts living under the Extroversion Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform”

Five People You Meet In Heaven

• “Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else. Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.”
• “All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
• “The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.”
• “Be satisfied. Be grateful. For what you have. For the love you receive. And for what God has given you.”
• “Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.”
• “Why people gather when people die? Why people feel they should? It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”
• “Strangers, are just family you have yet to come to know.”
• “War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.”
• “Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.”

The Memory Book

• “It's funny: I said the words out loud, and feel the fear, there in the pit of my stomach, but it's like it isn't part of me. It really is like it's happening to someone else, this terror.”
• “It hurt him that I hadn't wanted him there, but he didn't realise that I couldn't cope with trying to guess what I felt myself.”
• “I do not want to leave this table, this seat, this coffee and go anywhere else. Here it feels like I am almost safe, like I'm clinging on to a ledge, and as long as I don't move I will be fine and I won't fall. The longer I can sit here, without having to think about where I am and how to get home, the better. I push away the surge of fear and panic, and concentrate on now. On feeling happy.”
• “Not knowing what I don't know stops me from wanting to do anything. Everything I attempt is fraught with the possibility of failure.”

The Year I Met You

• “ ... I've always hoped generally that silent people hold a magic and a knowledge that less contained people lack; that their not saying something means that more important thoughts are going on inside their head.”
• “I realised that my hour and someone else's hour are not equal. We cannot spend it the same way, we cannot think of it the same way.
• “I've learned with most that there are always two stories to one event: the public story and the truth.”
• “I will not miss people at work. People are what bother me most in life. It bothers me that so many lack common sense, that their opinions can be biased and backward, so utterly frustrating, misguided, misinformed and dangerous that I can't stand to listen to them.”
• “Distance is all I can give someone I can't truly fathom.”
• “And as much as it pains me to say it, I am lonely. I can go an entire day without any socialisation, without a conversation with anyone. I wonder sometimes if I’m invisible.”
• “But when you think no one is listening or when you think no one is paying you any attention, you are so much more. It's a pity that you don't believe that yourself, or show the people you love.”
• “My shift wasn't instant, and often the slow pace of change can be painful, lonely and confusing, but without us realising it happening, it happens.”
• “Most people in life don't have to do anything to change us, they simply need to be.”
• “... it is ironic that it was only when I finally stopped that I moved the most.”

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

• “I hadn’t expected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.”

Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine

• “When you’re struggling hard to manage your own emotions, it becomes unbearable to have to witness other people’s, to have to try and manage theirs too.”

The Lights Between Oceans

• “Maybe all the times in my life I could have done without, maybe they were a test to see if I deserved you,”
• “Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.”
• “... everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember.”

When Breath Becomes Air

• “At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.”
• “From that point on, I resolved to treat all my paperwork as patients, and not vice verse.”
• “When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.”
• “I began to realise that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything.”
• “If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?”
• “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

The Next Person You Meet In Heaven

• “The tale of your life is written second by second, as shifting as the flip of a pencil to an eraser.”
• “When we build, we build on the shoulders of those who came before us. And when we fall apart, those who came before us help put us back together.”
• “The end of loneliness is when someone needs you. … and the world is so full of need.”
• “But the things we have done are never far behind us. And like a shadow, they go where we do.”
• “But just because you have silenced a memory does not mean you are free of it.”
• “You always wonder about your funeral. How big? Who’ll show up? In the end it’s meaningless. You realise, once you die, that a funeral is for everyone else, not you.”
• “Just because you see things straight doesn’t mean you see them in time.”
• “... we embrace our scars more than our healing, ... We can recall the exact day we got hurt, but who remembers the day the wound was gone?”

Holding Up The Universe

• “We cant fight another person’s battles, no matter how much we want to.”

Finding Chika

• “It takes a special strength to take care of a child, Chika, and a whole different strength to admit you cannot.”
• “It is all right not to have children if you don’t want them, Chika, but if you do, their absence can be aching.”
• “There are many kinds of selfishness in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time, because none of us know how much we have, and it is an affront to God to assume there will be more.”
• “The most precious thing you can give someone is your time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.”
• “Malè pa gen klakson.” [Misfortune doesn’t have a horn.] —Haitian proverb”
• “I want to say what I have learned about that word, tough, because children, especially sick children, have a toughness unique to their young souls, one that can comfort even the fretting adults around them.”
• “As you played on the floor, accepting the new rules, your toughness far exceeded mine, and gave us comfort, even as we were trying to comfort you.”
• “you make peace with the truth: love determines our bonds.”
• “At that moment, I didn’t care about who belonged to whom. I was yours, even if you were not mine.”
• “I think it all came down to the same thing: a fear of making the wrong move, or missing the right one. A fear of what was coming next.”
• “Surely there is a future, and hope will not be cut off. That’s from Proverbs.”
• “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.” —Dr. John Trainer”
• “Because of this, we sometimes overlooked the fact that, despite the physical challenges, your mind kept growing. Your thoughts deepened.”
• “Immerse ourselves so we never forget.”
• “Then why didn’t you stop believing? “Because,” he said, “as terrible as I felt, I took comfort in having something I could cry to, a power to whom I could shout, ‘Why?’ It is still better than having nothing to turn to at all.”
• “People don’t have to know you to pray for you,”
• “When you write, you also feel like you are in conversation, and sometimes I wrote my thoughts down, as if God could read them, and I asked for strength.”
• “C. S. Lewis, the man who wrote the Narnia books you so loved, once said it is easy to trust a rope as long as you’re using it to wrap a box. But when you’re clinging to it over a deadly precipice, it’s something else entirely.”
• “Men often fear that once they start a family, their wives will focus more on the kids, and their relationship will dwindle into car pools, chores, and laundry. This is based on something pretty childish in itself: an unwillingness to share attention.”
• “She told you not to worry, that all things come in time, and that you were beautiful and she was so proud of you. And I was never prouder to be her husband.”
• “when people get married, they share the love of a couple. But when children arrive, they create another love, not just for the new additions, but for the new entity they have created. The family. It is not better than a couple’s love, it’s complementary, forged with a new appreciation, and a wider, expansive heart.”
• “Nevertheless. … It summed up the battle Miss Janine and I often felt we were fighting with the medical world. Because to doctors, no matter how empathetic, you were one of many, and to us you were one of one. … nevertheless was a perfect word. It means “despite anything to the contrary.”
• “What we carry defines who we are. And the effort we make is our legacy.”
• “But no matter how a family comes together, and no matter how it comes apart, this is true and will always be true: you cannot lose a child. And we did not lose a child. We were given one.”