I have only recently started using the “highlight” feature of my kindle and I love going back to see what gripped me at the time I read it. One of my favourites is:
“If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through the hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser through his coins, set ‘em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.”
-Sharp Ends, Joe Abercrombie
by muddleheadd
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“Men spared their lives in great disasters often feel in their deliverance the workings of fate. The hand of Providence. This man saw in himself again what he’d perhaps forgot. That long ago he’d been elected out of the common lot of men. For what he was asked now to reckon with was that he’d been called forth twice out of the ashes, out of the dust and rubble. For what? You must not suppose such elections to be happy ones for they are not. In his sparing he found himself severed from both antecedents and posterity alike. He was but some brevity of a being. His claims to the common life of men became tenuous, insubstantial. He was a trunk without root or branch. Perhaps there was yet even then a moment when he would have gone to the church to pray. But the church lay in pieces on the ground. And in the darkened chancel within him had the ground also shifted, also cracked.” – The Crossing by McCarthy
The ending where the narrator says this guy still had a chance if only he still had his place to heal, but was unlucky in even that respect. It gets me.
“We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not”, said the witch, “or die of despair”. – Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials)