convincing you to read my favourite books with beautiful quotes, part 1
seven book recommendations to add to your tbr based on my favourite quotes
I’ve always loved giving book recommendations, so I wanted to create another book recommendation series for this newsletter so you can discover some new reads to add to your TBR. There’s really nothing better than someone reading a book because you suggested it.
I really love collecting beautifully written quotes from my favourite books. I have them saved on my Notion — just so I can pour over them whenever I want to relive their magic. So in this recommendation series I’ll be showcasing some quotes from my favourite books to convince you to read them!
I’m already working on a part 2 and 3 — so watch out for them too!
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
“When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.”
“The hole is loneliness,' said Cleo quietly.
'Why's that?' said Audrey,
'You can't stand above someone and tell them to get out of it,' she said. 'Or teach or preach it out of them. You have to be in it with them.”
“Everyone I know is either more successful or more interesting than me. This realization is nothing new. In fact, it used to feel like everyone I didn’t know was more successful and interesting than me too. I still remember the sensation of watching a talent show on TV as a child and realizing that the girl dancing was a whole year younger than me. She was wearing a red sequin dress and patent tap shoes. She looked like a ruby, a human jewel spinning across the stage. I was in my pajamas from T.J. Maxx eating cereal for dinner, already destined for a life of mediocrity. Why didn’t I just pull myself together back then? I was five! I could have turned it around!”
“What is a wedding, Cleo wondered, if not a private dream made public?”
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
“Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.”
“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
“Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.”
Bunny by Mona Awad
“Why do you lie so much? And about the weirdest little things?", my mother always asked me. "I don’t know", I always said. But I did know. It was very simple. Because it was a better story.”
“Can I take your coat?” Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin.”
“And that's when I realize that whatever pain I have, whatever true want that lives under all this greasy, spineless needing to please isn't something I want to give them.”
“I've never really not written, never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another.”
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of fucking story.”
“I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was like me. I don't believe in soul mates anymore and I'm not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I'd believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn't, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who's suffering from the same stuff you are.”
“She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn't have. I wouldn't have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.”
“I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to… I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace.”
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
“Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.”
“I couldn't be bothered to deal with fixing things. I preferred to wallow in the problem, dream of better days.”
“You can see wealth in people no matter what they're wearing. It's in the cut of their chins, a certain gloss to the skin, a drag and pause to their responsiveness. When poor people hear a loud noise, they whip their heads around. Wealthy people finish their sentences, then just glance back.”
“I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected, but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s. It was easy to hide behind the dull face I wore, moping around. I really thought I had everybody fooled. And I didn’t really read books about flowers or home economics. I liked books about awful things—murder, illness, death.”
One for My Enemy by Olivie Blake
“Write me a tragedy, Lev Fedorov,” she whispered to him. “Write me a litany of sins. Write me a plague of devastation. Write me lonely, write me wanting, write me shattered and fearful and lost. Then write me finding myself in your arms, if only for a night, and then write it again. Write it over and over, Lev, until we both know the pages by heart. Isn’t that a story, too?” she asked him softly.”
“Hate and love were so very similar. Both were intestinal, visceral. Both left scars, vestiges of pain. Hate could not be born from a place of indifference. Hate was only born from opposite sides of the same coin.”
“Sometimes my eyes open and I know, somewhere in my bones, that I have formed myself to the shape of waking up beside you.”
“My daughters are diamonds, as Yaga so often said. Nothing is more beautiful. Nothing shines brighter. And most importantly, nothing will break them.”
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
“Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.”
“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”
“To live,” said Camilla.
“To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.”
“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not.”
Have I convinced you to pick up any of these books? Or have you read any of them already? I’d love to know!
Until next time,
- Madeline
So many good quotes from great books! You’re inspiring me to start noting all my favorite quotes in one spot so I can go back and read through them together ☺️
I LOVE this series! I do the same thing of collecting beautiful quotes from books. If words can stop me in my tracks, I’m saving the quote!