33 Quotes That Will Make You Feel Something, From the Books I Read in 2022
You know that feeling you get when you’re reading and come across a passage or sentence that really moves you? Sometimes it makes you bust out laughing, sometimes you shed a tear, and sometimes it makes you pause and reflect. Here are some of my favorite quotes that moved me in some way, from the books I read this year. I hope they move you too–even if you haven’t read these books yet. And on that note, some of these favorite quotes were even from books I ended up not enjoying. It just goes to show that you can find gems almost anywhere…
“You see, doors are many things: fissures and cracks, ways between, mysteries and borders. But more than anything else, doors are change.”
—Alix E Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January
“This was going to be even more annoying than I had anticipated. And I had anticipated a pretty high level of annoyance. Maybe as high as 85%. Now I was looking at 90–possibly 95%...
—Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol
“For a human that would be a hormone-fueled ego talking. For a SecUnit, it’s just a fact.”
—Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol
“Perhaps I keep writing because I was raised in a world where words have power, where curves and spirals of ink adorn sales and skin, where a sufficiently talented word-worker might reach out and remake her world.”
—Alix E Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January
“That’s what I love about New York, you’re never the weirdest person in the room. There’s always that person with silver body paint, who asks you to repair his UFO. I like that you’re anonymous there, you’re whoever you decide to be. And places like this you never shake off what people first thought about you.”
—Emily Henry, Book Lovers
“She was a poem come to life, and each vein was a lyric.”
—Julie C. Dao, Forest of a Thousand Lanterns
“Adventure works in any strand. It calls to those who care more for living than their lives.”
—Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War
“Our love is stronger than time, greater than any distance. Our love spans across stars and worlds. I will find you again, I promise.”
―Sarah J. Maas, House of Sky and Breath
“Cancers of the Mind: Comparing, Complaining, Criticizing.”
―Jay Shetty, Think Like A Monk
“Heroes are just villains with worse survival instincts and moral superiority complexes.”
—Amanda Foody and Christine Herman, All of Our Demise
“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
—RF Kuang, Babel
“To know what people really are and not destroy them is savagely remarkable. She has exceptional restraint.”
―Olivie Blake, The Atlas Paradox
“You’re not the villain in my story.” “I am,” he says without remorse, his sharp jaw tight with tension. “But I’ll be the villain for you. Not to you.”
—Raven Kennedy, Gleam
“Comedy shows us that one must not take life too seriously, and tragedy teaches us what happens when we pay no attention to what comedy teaches us.”
―Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The City of Mist
“It's so easy to fall into the trap of believing you don't have control over your life--if we don't have control, then we don't have to hold ourselves responsible for our failings, or even our successes. Some people use that as an easy way out.”
―Samantha Young, There with You
“Reality was, after all, just so malleable–facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.”
—RF Kuang, Babel
“If a story does its job, it doesn't ever end. Not really. But it can change. This is the nature of folktales. They shift to fit each teller. Take whatever form suits the bearer best. What begins as a story of sorrow can be acknowledged, held like a sweetheart to the chest, rocked and sung to. And then it can be set down to sleep. It can become an offering. A lantern. An ember to lead you through the dark.”
—GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot
“What happens when the walls we raise outlive the dangers they were built to keep out? At what point does a fort become a cage?”
—GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot
“Some people were meant for great, lasting legacies. Others were meant for small moments of goodness, tiny but that rippled and grew in big, wide waves.”
―Zoraida Córdova, The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina
“But books, like people, die too. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a great book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
—Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
“The things that look fixed in the world, child––mountains, wealth, empires––their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like ant-hills.”
—Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
“…the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.”
—Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
“Memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present.”
—Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
“But then again, I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn’t like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.”
—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
“But grief isn’t a competition. It’s not an identical pain that we all meet one day when death finds us. It’s a monster, personalized by our love and memories to devour us just so. Grief is suffering, tailored.”
―Tracy Deonn, Bloodmarked
“Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don’t we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?”
—Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death.”
—Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
“No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.”
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being