Donna Tartt

“I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.”

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I felt drowned and extinguished by vastness – not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impossible distances between people even when they were within arms reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’ve been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.”

- Excerpts from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Rachel Hollis

“Perception means we don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. Take a burning house. To a fireman, a burning house is a job to do — maybe even his life‘s work or mission. For an arsonist? A burning house is something exciting and good. What if it’s your house? What if it’s your family who is standing outside watching every earthly possession you own burning up? That burning house becomes something else entirely. You don’t see things as they are; you see things through the lens of what you think and feel and believe. Perception is reality, and I’m here to tell you that your reality is colored much more by your past experiences than by what is actually happening to you. If your past tells you that nothing ever works out, that life is against you, and that you’ll never succeed, then how likely are you to keep fighting for something you want? Or, on the flipside, if you quit accepting no as the end of the conversation whenever you run up against opposition, you can shift your perception and fundamentally reshape your entire life. Every single part of your life — your gratitude, the way you manage stress, how kind you are to others, how happy you are — can be changed by a shift in your perception.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t have it in you to want something more for your life. Don’t tell me you have to give up because it’s difficult. This is life or death too. This is the difference between living a life you always dreamed of or sitting alongside the death of the person you were meant to become. That’s what it feels like to me when I’ve given up on a dream, even for a little while – as if I’m at a wake. As if I’m sitting in a room and looking at the evidence of what could’ve been. I’m sure many of you know what that’s like, and you either want to change it or keep yourself from getting there in the first place. You have to do something about it. You have to reach down inside yourself and remember the reason you started this. You had better find the will to keep going, because if you don’t, I promise you someone else will. And if that happens, girl, you will watch someone else achieve your dreams and enjoy the spoils of their hard-fought battle. And if that happens, you will understand one of the greatest lessons in this life: the only thing worse than giving up is wishing you hadn’t.”

- Excerpts from Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis