Not just reading, but active reading has always been one of my favorite pastimes. Underlining a passage or a new word, for some reason, makes it feel more real. Maybe years later, after I’ve forgotten characters’ names and the plot gets fuzzy, I’ll stick my thumb on the edge of a book and let the pages fan out — stopping only for what I underlined, what I found to be important enough for pause.
I recently thumbed through some of my favorite books and revisited these small moments of joy. Here are a few of my favorite words:
“If you can feel staying human is worthwhile, even when it can’t have any result whatsoever, you’ve beaten them.” — Ray Bradbury, 1984
“…most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.” — Susan Orlean, The Orchard Thief
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.” — Stephen King, On Writing
“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” he said, “live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” — Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451
“… science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.” — Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
“Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.” — Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
“In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface.” — Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Be certain of this: When honest love speaks, when true admiration begins, when excitement rises, when hate curls like smoke, you need never doubt that creativity will stay with you for a lifetime.” — Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed