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"Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future."
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"Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I'm only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision."
Friendship
"That's a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen, everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and get thirsty, but it's not really true. It's like you and your body are two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on, idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks while your world falls apart."
Survival
"Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts."
Mortality
"Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever."
Time
"Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close."
Truth
"Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run."
Memory
"The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come."
Struggle
"It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me.He never loved me.It was all a lie."The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.You must hurt or be hurt."
Strength
"You should only fall in love with people who will fall in love with you back."
Romance
"They couldn't have known that even this was a lie-that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along."
Happiness
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development
"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."
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"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
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"If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up."
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"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
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"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
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