Stephanie Perkins · 321 pages
Rating: (30.2K votes)
“You're a kaleidoscope, you change every time I look away.”
“He says presents aren't important, but I think they are - not because of how much they cost, but for the opportunity they provide to say I understand you.”
“Would you rather be great at something you like, or just okay at something you love?”
“I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.”
“I need you to be my person. I need to see you. And hear you. I need you to stay alive. And I need you to stop kissing other people just because they're standing next to you when the ball drops.”
“But people don't need to remember how it felt to be happy and safe in the past. They need to have hope that they can get there again in the future.”
“Sometimes I felt like I was waiting for my life to begin and more than anything, in that moment, I wanted to force some kind of beginning. I wanted things to be different than usual. I wanted to bend reality.”
“Shame leads to secrets, and secrets lead to lies, and lies ruin everything.”
“Noel was her very best friend - even if she wasn't his. Noel was her person.”
“Love was love.
But she hoped that he was not a dragon.”
“We all love and we all lose and we go on loving just the same.”
“I am here, and he is here, and everything I need to know is that I will hold him and he will hold me until I am warm again, until I know I belong. (Your Temporary Santa)”
“Not that kind of cheating," Mags said. "More like...skipping ahead. If you like someone, you should have to make an effort. You should have to get to know the person--you should have to work for that first kiss.”
“Christmas Eve is my favorite... I think the anticipation is more fun than anything else. I kind of lost that. The idea that something - food, traditions, an arbitrary date on the calendar - can be special because we decide it should be. We make it special. Not just for ourselves, but for others.”
“I sang because that is what I do when I am happy and when I'm sad. I sang because it is who I am when I am being the best possible version of me.”
“And there - when he smiles, his whole faces lights up. It's like his other expressions are placeholders.”
“Sweetheart, when you lose someone, you lose a little bit of yourself, too. And that missing piece? Sometimes you have to lose the rest of yourself to find it.”
“If you let a single life event define you then all you need to change things--if you want them to change--is another.”
“She wanted to be free, and if she could never be free, at least she wanted to be brave - brave enough not to sell herself, no matter what the payment, or the cost of refusing.”
“You can't undo loss. You can't unmake a mistake. (What The Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth?)”
“The door opens with a rusted jingle, and an animatronic Santa insults my moral virtue three times. Ho, ho, ho.”
“The feeling it gave me was an odd combination of weightless self-pity and excitement. I understood my life was meaningless, and this knowledge freed me up to accomplish absolutely anything.”
“She was the goddess of...herself. And he could not look away from her.”
“I stayed there on the floor like that for a long, long time.
Eating and crying.
Crying and eating.”
“Thr rareness, the specialness, of North. Of this night. She wished it could last forever. (It's a yuletide miracle, Charlie Brown)”
“His eyes follow me everywhere, and we keep sharing smiles that feel like secrets.(Kiersten White)”
“I am worried about being in love, because it invelves asking so much. I am worried my life will never fit into his.”
“Some kinds of misery make you hate the world, but some kinds make you hate yourself, and--butter and cheese not withstanding--Neve had no question that Spear was the latter.”
“Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is presents. And in the real world, Santa’s not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa’s lap.”
“And at that very moment, when the kiss was laid on the boy's head, and the mother's arm were firmly wrapped around her child as they'd been when she'd first held him, when she'd first cradled him as a baby, when she'd held him as a child crying over some lost bauble, when she'd held him as a boy when a fever had come on strong, when she'd held him as a young man in the full throat of summer, and when the horse had thrown him and he lay motionless on the flagstones and she'd held him then- at that very moment, the ivy ceased its endless writhings and lapsed into immobility and fell quiet.”
“This emptiness inside of me here,” he placed my hand on his chest, “means I love you. When you’re not here, I can’t focus. It’s too loud . . . But my heartbeat does this when you’re close.”
“Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?”
“She knelt at the side of my bed, kissed my cheek, and I woke, rubbed my eyes, looked up at her dreamily. The hall light shone in my eyes. There was a halo in her hair. It must have been that Tupperware bowl on her head.”
“Who was it who had said you were only as happy as your unhappiest child?”
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.