Thursday Thirteen: 13 quotes I love ( from books I love!)

It is Thursday already again? HOW?!
Link to others participating HERE.

My topic for this week is....  Quotes that I love from books. Here we go:

1. From "The Song of Kahunsha" by Anosh Irani

"To him, real prayer means sending a bright thought, like Thank you or I love you , to heaven. That is prayer. The moment you ask for something, the prayer room becomes a marketplace." p.9

2. From "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khalid Hosseini

" She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. "As a reminder of how women like us suffer," She'd said. "How quietly we endure all that falls upon us." p.82

3. From 'The Birth House" by Ami McKay

"It's a disgusting mess we come through to be born, the sticky wet of blood and afterborth, mother wailing, child crying....the helpless soft spot at the top of it's head pulsing, waiting to be kissed. Our parents and teachers say it's a miracle, but it's not. It's going to happen no matter what, there's no choice in the matter. To my mind, a miracle is something that could go one way or the other. The fact that something happens when by all rights it shouldn't is what makes us take notice, it's what saints are made of, it takes the breath away. How a mother comes to love her child, caring at all for this thing that has made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that makes her wish she were dead...that's the miracle." p.20

4. From " The Heretics Daughter" by Kathleen Kent

"And what finally of the tortures of a guilty soul? What concoction is there that can be chewed and swallowed and downed into the belly to force the poison of self recrimination back through the pores of the skin? In what organ in the body does it reside? A seeping wound can be bound. Salve can be added to a burn or swelling bubo. Poison can be drawn into a leech or a lance. But guilt is a ghost that takes the shape of the body it inhabits and consumes all that is tender within it's shell: brain, bowels, and heart. I cannot pluck it out like a splinter of glass or treat it with herbal brews."

5. From "Factotum" by D.M. Cornish

" Look at these pullings of long faces! How does knowing who you are make you any different? You have been you all this time; you will remain you for the long stretch of your life regardless of the reckonings in your thinking soils. The only alteration you have undergone is to simply have information to remedy your self-doubtings. Cease these snivels!"


6. From "Bloodhound" by Tamora Pierce

"Keep Breathing, Keep Learning."

7. From "The Truth of All Things" by Kieran Shields

"I never read the newspapers. Nothing but canned bleating. People read the newspapers to learn what is happening in the world. Youcouldn't find a lazier and more misdirected guide if you tried. Even when there is no deliberate deception, tha accounts either wildly exaggerate or else completely underestimate the actual importance of the events described. No event can be accurately judged unless it is considered with adequate background and perspective, both of which newspapers ignore and the reading public distain." (p 205)

8. From "Revenge of the Vinyl Cafe" by Stuart McLean

"We do this thing. We open our hearts to the world around us. And the more we do that, the more we are bound to find ourselves one day standing in the kitchen of our life, surrounded by the ones we love, and feeling empty, and alone, and sad, and lost for words, because one of our loved ones, who should be there, is missing. Mother or father, brother or sister, wife or husband, or a dog or cat. It doesn't really matter. After a while each death feels like all the deaths, and you stand there like everyone else has stood there before you, while the big wind of sadness blows around and through you." (p. 239)

9. From "Alice In Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

"I could tell you my adventures — beginning from this morning," said Alice a little timidly: "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." ~ from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

10. From Alice In Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. "
11. From "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” 

12. From "The Little Prince" by  Antoine de Sait-Exupery.

“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems... But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night..You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me... You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure... It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh” 

13. And my favorite scripture of all time from the Book of Mormon, Mosiah Chapter 2, Verse 19. (I have to give a disclaimer that I am not an active Mormon, nor active in any religion,  nor do I read the book of Mormon any longer - but I still like this verse)

"O how you ought to thank your heavenly King!"