Looking for Alaska - John Green

After - Anna Todd

Les Misérables I - Victor Hugo

L'homme à la voiture bleue - Sébastien Gendron

« Antoine a toujours détesté l’automne. Ses parents n’ont pas bien fait les choses : il est né en novembre. »

« Encore cinquante interminables minutes avant d’arriver. Antoine monte le volume de son lecteur MP3. L’intro de I’m feeling good de Muse envahit ses oreilles. »

L’homme à la voiture bleue – Sébastien Gendron

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

« The whole convergence was like a lucky but entirely accidental chemical fusion, something that could only happen once. You might gather the same materials and make identical preparations, but you would never be able to duplicate the result. »

« Tazaki was the only last name that did not have a color in its meaning. From the very beginning this fact made him feel a little bit left out. »

« He never bragged about his grades, however, and preferred to cautiously stay in the background, almost as if he were embarrassed to be so smart. »

« Tsukuru could see that they genuinely loved it when all five of them got together as a group. Like an equilateral pentagon, where all sides are the same length, their group’s formation had to be composed of five people exactly – any more or any less wouldn’t do. »

« He loved his friends, loved the sense of belonging he felt when he was with them. »

« Her prominent cheekbones gave her an obstinate look, and her nose was narrow and pointed, but there was something indefinably vital and alive about her face that caught his eye. Her eyes were narrow, but when she really looked at somthing they suddenly opened wide : two dark eyes, never timid, brimming with curiosity.

He wasn’t normally conscious of it, but there was one part of his body that was extremely sensitive, somewhere along his back. This soft, subtle spot he couldn’t reach was usually covered by something, so that it was invisible to the naked eye. But when, for whatever reason, that spot became exposed and someone’s finger pressed down on it, something inside him would stir. »

« He studied German and French ; he even went to the language lab to practice English. He discovered to his surprise, that he had a knack for learning languages. Yet he didn’t meet anyone he was drawn to. »

« He never met anyone he felt like gettint to know better, so he spent most of his time in Tokyo alone. On the plus side, he read constantly, more than he ever had before. »

« And slowly he grew used to this new self, with all its changes. It was like acquiring a new language, memorizing the grammar. »

« Ideas are like beards. Men don’t have them until they grow up. »

« Haida was a short but handsome young man. His face was small and narrow, like an ancient Greek statue, but his facial features were, if anything, classical, with a kind of intellgent and reserved look. He wasn’t the type of pretty young boy who immediately grabbed people’s attention, but one of whose graceful beauty only became apparent over time. »

« All five of them were already, at this point, thirty years old – no longer the age when one dreamed of an ordered, harmonious community of friends. »

"´Le mal du pays.' It´s French. Usually it's translated as 'homesickness,' or 'melancholy.' If you put a finer point on it, it's more like 'a groundless sadness called forth in a person's heart by a pastoral landscape.' It's a hard expression to translate accurately."

« People whose freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right ? I know I don’t want to live like that. »

« Usually he wasn’t much of a talker, but something about talking with this younger man stimulated his mind, and sometimes the words just flowed. »

« Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight. I’m able to see those colors clearly. »

« Maybe I am fated to always be alone, Tsukuru found himself thinking. »

« Words don’t come out when you’re hurt that deeply. »

« You look sort of – I don’t know – gaunt and fearless-looking. You have these sunken cheeks, piercing eyes. Back then you had a rounder, softer kind of face. »

« Beautiful features, always immaculately dressed, the kind of woman that makes a great impression. Their hair is always nicely curled. They major in French literature at expensive private women’s colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girl-friends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are formally introduced to one, and quit work to get married. Then they devote themselves to getting their children into famous private schools. As he sat there, Tsukuru pondered the kind of lives they led. »

« The four of us who stayed behind weren’t brave enough to venture out like you did. We were afraid of leaving the town we were brought up in, and saying goodbye to such close friends. »

« Vacations and friends are the two best things in life. »

« Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language. »

« Seeing her now, the true weight of sixteen years of time struck him with a sudden intensity. There are some things, he concluded, that can only be expressed through a woman’s form. »

« Before long, she developed a severe eating disorder. She vomited up almost everything she ate, and gave herself enemas to get rid of the rest. »

« She wanted to stop having periods, Eri said. Extreme weight loss stops you from having periods. That’s what she was hoping for. She didn’t want to ever get pregnant again, and probably didn’t want to be a woman anymore. She wanted, if possible, to have her womb removed. »

« One day I looked around me and realized I was fading. »

« And no matter how much I tried to help her, I couldn’t stop her retreat from reality. It was awful for me. If  I’d stayed in Nagoya, I think my mind would have started to go, too. »

« Don’t let the bad elves get you. »

« For a sicence type, you certainly can get pretty passionate. »

« Everyone was boarding a night train, heading to a far-off destination. Tsukuru envied them. At least they had a place they needed to go. »

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami

And the Mountains Echoed - Khaled Hosseini

« Once upon a time, in the days when divs and jinns and giants roamed the land, there lived a farmer named Baba Ayub. »

« Qais, who was three years old. Qais was a little boy with dark blue eyes. He charmed anyone who met him with his devilish laughter. »

« The sleepwalking stopped after a time, but Qais grew attached to the bell and refused to part with it. »

« A finger had to bec ut, to save the hand. »

«Have you ? it said in a voice thick as thunder. »

« I must say your courage rouses in me a surge of admiration. »

« The div pulled the curtains open. Behind it was a glass window. Through the window, Baba Ayub looked down on an enormous garden. Lines of cypress trees bordered the garden, the ground at their base filled with flowers of all colors. There were pools made of bluet iles, and marble terraces, and lush green lawns. Baba Ayub saw beautifully sculpted hedges and water fountains gurgling in the shade of pomegranate trees. In three lifetimes he could not have imagined a place so beautiful. »

« Someday, when he is a man, hem ay choose to leave, and he shall be free to do so. I suspect he will touch many lives with his kindness and bring happiness to those trapped in sorrow. »

« When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color. Have you made your choice ? »

« From the bed of the wagon, Pari’s hand quickly slipped into Abdullah’s. She was looking up at him, her eyes liquid, and she was smiling her gap-toothed smile like no bad thing would ever befall her so long as he stood at her side. He closed his fingers around her hand, he way he did each night when he and his little sister slept in their cot, their skulls touching, their legs tangled. »

« They traded furtive happy glances, brother and sister, but saud little for fear of souring Father’s mood and spoiling their good fortune. »

« Inside the box were all of the feathers that Pari collected. They were her most cherished belongings. »

« It was for Pari that Shuja lost all composure. His love for her was vast and unclouded. She was his universe. »

« The oak towered over everything in Shadbagh and was the oldest living thing in the village. »

« This was his purpose, he believed, the reason God had made him, so he would be there to take care of Pari when He took away their mother. »

« Everything in the room was polished, free of dust. Abdullah had never in his life been so conscious of his own dirtiness. »

« If Masooma glanced in their direction, they looked idiotically privileged. They imagined they had shared a moment with her. She interrupted conversations midsentence, smokers mid-drag. She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups. »

« A story is like a moving train : no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later. »

« Not that it absolves me, but I was a young man, Mr. Markos, eager to take on the world, full of dreams, modest and vague as they may have been, and I pictured my youth ebbing away, my prospects increasingly truncated. So I left. To help provide for my sisters, yes, that is true. But also to escape. »

« I was dying a thousand deaths inside. »

« But one thing he always told us was this : that if you look at any Muslim’s palm, no matter where in the world, you will see something quite astonishing. They all have the same lines. Meaning what ? Meaning that the lines on a Muslim’s left hand make the Arabic number eighty-one, and the ones on the right the number eighteen. Substract eighteen from eighty-one and what do you get ? You get sixty-three. The Prophet’s age when he died, peace be upon him. »

« I went to bed that night feeling like I was perhaps more than ordinary myself. This was the effect she had on me. »

« She usually did most of the talking, which suited me well ; I was happy enough to be the vessel into which she poured her stories. »

« And she’s been given the perfect name : Pari. She is indeed as beauiful as a fairy. »

« He had all the furniture in Pari’s room painted yellow since he had discovered this was her favorite color. »

« He offered to accompany her to the hospital, but in a perfunctory way. It was a mere formality. »

« She does remember Julien saying, ‘Pari-like the city ?’ And from Maman the familiar reply, ‘No, without the s. It means ‘fairy’ in Farsi. »

« For instance, in Provence two yers earlier when Pari had seen a massive oak tree outisde a farmhouse. Another time at the Jardin des Tuileries when she had watched a young mother pull her son in a little red Radio Flyer Wagon. Pari didn’t understand. She read a story once about a middle-aged Turkish man who had suddenly slipped into a deep depression when the twin brother he never knew existed had suffered a fatal heart attack while on a canoe excursion in the Amazon rain forest. It was the closest anyone had ever come to articulating what she felt. »

« Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket thei flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly. »

« By the time the Berlin Wall comes down so have the walls in her academic life, and she has slowly won over most of her colleagues with her sensible demeanor and disarming sociability. »

« the Aegean, blue and calm in the summer morning, white-capped in the afternoon when the meltemi winds blew in from the north. »

« Madaline was one of those people to whom elegance came effortlessly as though it were a genetic skill, like the ability to curl your tongue into the shape of a tube. With Madaline, there was never a lull in the conversation ; stories just trilled out of her. One morning she told us about her travels – to Ankara, for instance, where she had strolled the banks of theEnguri Su and sipped green tea laced with raki, or the time she and Mr. Gianakos had gone to Kenya and ridden the backs of elephants among thorny acacias and even sat down to eat cornmeal mush and coconut rice with the local villagers. »

« Madaline said that in Ankara she had gone to a place called Kugulu Park and watched swans gliding in the water. She said the water was dazzling. »

« Thalia and I were upstairs, playing a game of tavli »

« Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given rndomly, stupidly. »

« If I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behaviour is messy and unpredicable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story. »

« He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said you ended up wayward, without a proper home or legitimate identity. »

« she has summoned her lost brother with this magic chant like a genie in a fairy tale. »

« Being alone with her on those weekend getaways was like curling up into a soft cloud. »

« Another nursery rhyme. This one about the bridge in Avignon. »

« It strikes the gray-metal-colored Rhône broadside and breaks on its surface into little shards of brightness. ‘Every French child knows this song.’ »

And the Mountains Echoed – Khaled Hosseini

The Library of Unrequited Love - Sophie Divry

« Nobody sees me, that’s my problem. »

« Dewey is the Mendeleev of librarians. »

« To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world. »

« Nowadays I don’t go on holiday, not even weekends, I can’t stand leisure. »

« Oh, don’t think I’m complaining. I like my job. Well, O.K., I confess, when  began studying, I did’nt mean to become a librarian. I wanted to be a secondary school teacher, but I failed the teaching diploma. »

« So men, no, that’s all over. Love, for me, is something I find in books. I read a lot, it’s comforting. You’re never alone if you live surrounded by books. They lift my spirit. The main thing is to be uplifted. »

« To appeal to me, a man can ve shorter than me or taller, richer or poorer, older or younger, nothing’s an obstacle, I’m open-minded, you see. But he has to be more intelligent. An he has to be clean-shaven, no stubble, I hate scruffy people. »

« Then I realized it was the back of his neck that had captivated me, right from the start. Because is there anything more fascinating about a person than a beautiful neck seen from behind ? The back of the neck is a promise, summing up the whole person through their most intimate feature. Yes, intimate. It’s the part of your body you can never see yourself. »

« Well, it’s not really physical, no, he’s very polite, and I like that side of him too, but, well, he just seems…very intelligent. That’s it. And exactly the kind of intelligence that I appreciate. Someone who spends his time reading books, taking notes from books, selecting books, and all that so as to write another book, it’s really admirable. »

« That’s what sofas are for : sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk about literature. »

« Well, isn’t an American a European who missed the boat home ? »

« I like men who are more intelligent than me, but the idea that they might think me stupid paralyses me. »

« What kind of literature is going to be produced in a society where there are no wars or epidemics or revolutions ? I’ll tell you what : badly written novels about nice girls and boys falling in love, who make each other suffer without meaning to, and spend all their time crying and saying they’re sorry. Ridiculous. »

« People apologize too much, everyone’s afraid of giving offence and it leads to literature being written for babies. »

« I’m one of those who think that it ought to be a sign of recognition for a book to be bought by a library. A distinction. »

« Because culture isn’t the same as pleasure. Culture calls for a permanent effort by the individual to escape the vile condition of an under-civilized primate. »

« Not speaking when you’re in a group is unnatural, but it’s part of learning to be civilized. »

« People can be lonely, terribly lonely. Reading’s an excuse. A pretext. What they’re looking for here is something to hang on to. If you don’t believe me, how come you don’t even want to go home at night ? Who would come and shut themselves up in this basement if they were of sound mind ? Yes, go on, admit it, you’re a bit borderline yourself. Well, anyway, libraries do attract mad people. Especially in summer. Of course, if you closed the libraries during the summer holidays, you wouldn’t see them. No more lunatics, poor people, children on their own, students who’ve failed their exams, no more little old chaps, no more culture and no more humanity. »

« Nothing is sadder than an empty library. »

« But really that’s all I do want, to be asked a question, to be disturbed, just a bit. »

« Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person’s life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. It can, I promise you. »

« When your family’s abandoned you, you haven’t got any friends, you think you’re rubbish, worthless, nothing, books are a great help. Just think about it : what can make human beings suffer more than awarenes of their limits ? I don’t mean fear of death, I mean our suffering at realizing our intelligence is limited. But when we go into a library and look at all those bookcases stretching into the distance, what descends on our soul, if not grace ? Spiritually, we cana t last fill the terrible emptiness that makes us just worms creeping on this earth. Those endless bookshelves reflect back to us an ideal image, the image of the full range of the human mind. »

« In fact, the library is the place where the greatest solidarity between humans takes place. »

« Life isn’t pre-programmed like a washing machine. »

« Yes, like Mummy, the library gives you a magic kiss and everything’s better. »

« On the contrary, you need knidness, more kindness, always more kindness. I see them come in here, the young kids from technical college, apprentices, the children who need study support. »

« When you’ve always been useless at school, thousands of books all gathered together in one place are scary, humiliating, for a man they’re castrating – well, that’s by the by. »

« But writing is a sexual activity. »

The Library of Unrequited Love – Sophie Divry