convincing you to read my favourite books with beautiful quotes, part 2
seven more book recommendations to add to your tbr based on my favourite quotes
Welcome to part 2 of my “convincing you to read my favourite books with beautiful quotes” series!
I loved sharing the most impactful quotes and passages from some of my other favourite books in part 1 of this book recommendation series — it seems like so many of you enjoy collecting book quotes too! I’d love to know how you save your favourite ones as you read, let me know in the comments.
I hope I’m able to persuade you to read some more of my most loved books. I have favourites from across so many different genres, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about any of these ones since I finished them.
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever
“He couldn’t stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.”
“He wanted to forget he'd ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.”
“Side by side they are twin angels on a headstone, cold and terrible and immutable. They were boys once, he remembers, but they aren't anymore.”
“I kill them because they're beautiful, and it's the only way I can keep them.”
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.”
“Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.”
“Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don't do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile, and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
“She wasn't interested in telling other people's futures. She was interested in going out and finding her own.”
“When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away.”
“She recognized the strange happiness that came from loving something without knowing why you did, that strange happiness that was sometimes so big that it felt like sadness.”
“More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.”
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
“For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.”
“But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.”
“Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”
“Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?”
The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it.”
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Please be aware this book contains: sexual assault, rape, pedophilia, childhood abuse, gaslighting and suicide.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
“Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”
“It's both creepy and out of my control, this ability I have to notice so much about other people when I'm positive no one notices anything at all about me.”
“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Please be aware this book contains: multiple types of physical, sexual and psychological abuse, childhood abuse, violence, prostitution, gaslighting, kidnapping, self-inflicted harm, addiction, prejudice and loss/grief.
“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”
“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
“None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
“There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.”
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
Have I convinced you to pick up any of the books in this list? Or have you read any of them already? I’d love to know!
They’ll definitely be a part 3 in the upcoming weeks.
Until next time,
- Madeline
The Haunting of Hill House is seconded, and also its Netflix adaptation which is incredibly well done. I've never seen a horror story with such an original basis, such a strong mystery and eerie theme throughout too...
My Dark Vanessa is one of those books I saw so much on bookstagramtok that I wrote it off as gimmicky but I am intrigued... A Little Life is one of the most consuming books I've ever read!