14 Book Quotes I Love

August 9^th is Book Lovers Day, an unofficial holiday observed to encourage bibliophiles to celebrate reading and literature. People are advised to put away their smartphones and every possible technological distraction and pick up a book to read.

Last year on Book Lovers Day I took the day’s theme quite literally by sharing books I love and gave 5 stars to on Goodreads. This year for World Book Day I flipped the script and shared books I did not like at all, or downright hated, and gave 1 star to on Goodreads. If you are not familiar with the Goodreads rating it works like this:

1 star – did not like it
2 stars – it was okay
3 stars – liked it
4 stars – really liked it
5 stars – it was amazing

For Book Lovers Day 2020 I decided against doing a book tag and instead opted to share 14 book quotes I love picked from books I own. Obviously I love waaaaaayyyyyyyy more book quotes than the ones I have picked for today’s post, but I cannot share them all in one go so I settled on these 14. Why 14? Because it is one of my boyfriend’s favourite numbers and I love paying tribute to him in such little ways 🙂

Some of the quotes, like those by Warsan Shire, John Green and Iyanla Vanzant, you may have come across them on the blog as I have used them before. I know the Gone Girl one is less of a quote and more of a passage but I just love it sooo much and think everyone should read it and it is my blog and I can do what I want. Lol.

1. My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude.
   ― Warsan Shire
2. And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.
   ― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
3. For you, a thousand times over.
   ― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
4. He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
   ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
5. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
   ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
6. What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.
   ― John Green, Paper Towns
7. As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
   ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
8. you can’t make homes out of human beings
   someone should have already told you that
   and if he wants to leave
   then let him leave
   you are terrifying
   and strange and beautiful
   something not everyone knows how to love.
   ― Warsan Shire
9. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)
   ― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
10. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.
    ― Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Stay with Me
11. You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.
    ― Iyanla Vanzant, Yesterday, I Cried
12. We accept the love we think we deserve.
    ― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
13. We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.
    ― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
14. People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy.
    ― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Do you have any favourite quote(s) dear reader? I would love to hear it/them in the comment section 🙂