The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

“Everyone knew that he was courting me, everyone knew that I would consent when I was ordered to do so. The only person who did not know this was the king. He thought that the pace of the courtship was determined by his desire.” – Chapter 2, pg. 35

“Oh what a tragedy queen! You can smile when your heart is breaking because you are a woman, and a courtier, and a Howard. That’s three reasons for being the most deceitful creature on God’s green earth.”
– Chapter 4, pg. 98

“If there had been money on it I think I would be getting out my purse. You Boleyns only lose when there is nothing to gain by winning.” – Chapter 5, pg. 125

“We are making a new order. A new world. There is talk of the end of the authority of the Pope, the map of France and Spain is being redrawn. Everything is changing, and here we are, at the very front of the change. But you cannot refuse me. The world’s not changed that much yet. Men still rule.” – Chapter 11, pg. 191

“He was the father of my children and yet he would have no interest in them until they were old enough for him to use as counters in the game of inheritance. He had been my lover for years and yet it had been my task to make sure that he never knew me. As he lay on me, I felt as lonely as if I were the ship which bore my name, out all alone at sea.” – Chapter 13, pg. 211

“‘I have to be queen,’ was all she said. ‘And you have to help me. You know that’s how it is, Mary. Only a fool rails against the way the dice fall.’ ‘They’re weighted dice when I play with you,’ I said.” – Chapter 21, pg. 313

So those were some of my favorite book quotes from The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory.

I must be a plot junkie. Even if a book is written badly, I just have to know what happens next. Had I paid any attention in history class, I doubt I would have been turning pages like paper is going out of style (damn you, Kindle).

But since I had no clue what would happen to Anne Boleyn (much less Mary), I found myself nervously fretting over whether this pregnancy would finally result in a boy for the throne. Don’t get me wrong: the character development is terrible. Zero sympathy for either of the Boleyn girls (and pretty much everyone else in the story). My biggest problem with the book was the repetitiveness of it all: spring, summer, fall, winter. I understand seasons repeat, but that doesn’t mean Gregory’s writing must do the same (and by same, I mean 661 pages of same). The most interesting stuff was the witchcraft and incest. Too bad that didn’t make an appearance until page… what? 660?

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

“Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”
– Chapter 1, pg. 7

“I have customers who bring their wives to my shop. The women come uncovered; they talk to me directly, look me in the eye without shame. They wear makeup and skirts that show their knees. Sometimes they even put their feet in front of me and their husbands stand there and watch. They allow it. They think nothing of a stranger touching their wives’ bare feet! They think they’re being modern men, intellectuals, on account of their education, I suppose.” – Chapter 10, pg. 63

"On the streets, Mariam saw people stopping in their tracks. At traffic lights, faces emerged from the windows of cars, turned upward toward the falling softness. What was it about a season’s first snow fall that was so entrancing? Was it the chance to see something as yet unsoiled, untrodden? To catch the fleeting grace of a new season, a lovely beginning, before it was trampled and corrupted?” – Chapter 13, pg. 79

“She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women like us suffer. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.” – Chapter 13, pg. 82

“The only enemy an Afghan cannot defeat is himself.” – Chapter 18, pg. 122

“Somewhere in the city someone had just died, a pall of black smoke was hovering over some building that had collapsed in a puffing mass of dust. There would be bodies to step around in the morning. Some would be collected. Others not. Then Kabul’s dogs, who had developed a taste for human meat, would feast.” – Chapter 26, pg. 169

So those were some of my favorite book quotes from A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.

I didn’t cry. And I didn’t like it as much as The Kite Runner. I got the impression Hosseini assumed you had read his other book, so he went right ahead

and packed this one full of all the Afghanistan war details he breezed over the first time. The Mujahideen? Hazara? Tajik? Half the book I had no clue which of these groups were fighting the other. Hell, I’m not even sure if those words refer to a religion, ethnicity, or the first name of some commander guy. Anyway, it sure is good to live in America. Never will I have to worry a doctor might perform my C-section without anesthesia. Plus, such violent misogyny is disgusting. If I were Mariam I would have bashed my husband's head in earlier. And then do the same to anyone who tried to hang me for it. Hmm, why do I sound like a serial killer in all my posts?

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

“Ali had a congenital paralysis of his lower facial muscles, a condition that rendered him unable to smile and left him perpetually grim-faced. It was an odd thing to see the stone-faced Ali happy, or sad, because only his slanted brown eyes glinted with a smile or welled with sorrow. People say that eyes are windows to the soul. Never was that more true than with Ali.”
– Chapter 2, pg. 7

“With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world to his liking. The problem, of course, was that he saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”
– Chapter 3, pg. 14

“Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.” – Chapter 3, pg. 19

“War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.” – Chapter 10, pg. 100

“America was a river, roaring along, unmindful of the past. I could wade into this river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins. If for nothing else, for that, I embraced America.” – Chapter 11, pg. 119

“That last thought had brought no sting with it. I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.” – Chapter 25, pg. 313

“Sohrab’s silence wasn’t the self-imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.” – Chapter 25, pg. 315

“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird’s flight. But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.” – Chapter 25, pg. 324

So those were some of my favorite book quotes from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

I cried. I think that’s a valid reason for me to like the book. That and Hosseini did an amazing job bringing everything full circle. So full circle that for a while there, I was getting annoyed with how perfectly things were working out for the main character (think Stephanie Meyer’s The Host). But by the end of the

story, when the tears were running down my cheeks, I didn’t care so much. What I really want to know is who came up with the idea of kite fighting? Because it makes perfect sense to allow young children to glue glass shards to string and let them run blindly through intersections. Why do we not have more games that promote hand injury and sudden death in America? In fact, the only part of this book that bored me was when Amir escaped Afghanistan to come live in the States. As a Southern California native, I know how exciting flea markets can be. Next on my list is A Thousand Splendid Suns. We’ll see if Hosseini can get me to tear up one more time.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

“It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was in–but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they were alone.”
– Chapter 2, pg. 22

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.” – Chapter 3, pg. 34

“By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle and it was there.” – Chapter 3, pg. 35

“Drowned in the lake, ravished by gypsies, struck by a passing motorcar, she thought ritually, a sound principle being that nothing was ever as one imagined it, and this was an efficient means of excluding the worst.”
– Chapter 9, pg. 95

“A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. It was thought, perception, sensations that interested her, the conscious mind as a river through time, and how to represent its onward roll, as well as all the tributaries that would swell it, and the obstacles that would divert it. If only she could reproduce the clear light of a summer's morning, the sensations of a child standing at a window, the curve and dip of a swallow's flight over a pool of water. The novel of the future would be unlike anything in the past.” – Chapter 14, pg. 265

“How easily this unthinking family love was forgotten.” – Chapter 14, pg. 330

So those were some of my favorite book quotes from Atonement by Ian McEwan.

Man, Ian McEwan is a great writer! This book could have had zero plot and I still would have loved every sentence. He has a gift for describing the complex thought processes of his characters in a way that is almost poetic. The scene where Briony sits in the nursery (before witnessing the exchange between Robbie and her older sister) is pure genius. Pure literary genius. And on top of that, the plot is incredible. How often do you find a book with a

storyline that hasn't been done before? Not that often. Seeing the movie before reading the book (usually a no-no, but who could resist Keira Knightly and James McAvoy?) only made it that much better because I could follow the story when it jumped around. Plus, I had plenty of time for my anger to dissipate (I'm obviously referring to the "Just kidding! That didn't actually happen!" ending that left most people fuming mad). The funniest thing is that I actually thought Atonement was an old book – old as in written 50 years ago. I’ve heard his other books are hit-or-miss, so I guess I’ll just have to see if I still love his writing when the plot isn’t so epic.