hey there👋
Thanks for stopping by~
This is the 5th consecutive year I’ve continued the tradition of reading (at least) a book a week! I stopped book counting this year to stay more aligned with the practice of enjoying books vs. quantifying them. I’ve continued Virtual Book Club (hovering around 100 members on a rolling month basis) at work and 85% of books purchased were from local book stores. Buying local has allowed me to support causes/communities I believe in, not to mention it’s always a cozy moment being surrounded by readers and books (down with Bezos and big corps!!). My favourite bookstore in Toronto is Flying Books – check them out the next time you’re thinking about buying a book. Also sharing some beautiful book stores/libraries I visited in 2025 🥸
Looking ahead to 2026, I want to become an ESOTERIC READER – borderline insufferable and deeply entrenched in some obscure useless topic, because who determines what has meaning anyways? Re-reading books has taught me that some of the most beautiful details and connections are missed on the first reading.
Without further ado, below is a compilation of book quotes that were meaningful to me. Hope one resonates with you:)
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grief = depth of love🦮
“Grief is just love looking for a place to settle.”
― Mikki Brammer, The Collected Regrets of Clover
“[s]He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People
“What we’ll always have is something we lost”
― Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother
“I just want everything to be like it was…And for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
“Partings are strange. It seems so simple: one minute ago, four, five, he was here, at her side; now, he is gone. She was with him; she is alone. She feels exposed, chill, peeled like an onion.”
― Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
“I wondered whether, in life, you get one big role, some message you need to deliver to someone, and when it’s done, it’s time to go.”
― Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife: Stories
“Can you possibly imagine how painful it is to suddenly have the one you love leave for no reason, how much it hurt your heart, how deeply it ripped you apart, how much you bled inside?”
― Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls
“…my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.””
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
letters to my ex 📪
“When tragedies drag on, do they become comedies instead, or grow more tragic?”
― Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child
“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
“Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for whatever reason, is suddenly severed. For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse.”
― Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls
“You tried to tell your story to people who didn’t know how to listen.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
“Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection
“…believe in nothing but a woman’s capacity to survive disappointment”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters
“That’s who he is. Everything’s easier if you can just accept that and move on.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7
“Can you love a person without liking him? “
― Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child
time is a social construct
“But if time exists only in my head, and I’m the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I’m owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.”
― Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
“We live so many lives within our lives – smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up – and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.”
― Ia Genberg, The Details
“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time–the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot
“Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian
“We’re a strange bunch inside a container of time. If time is a container, that is… It’s more like a train, and we are all seated in the same compartment. As if we are on a journey.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume III
“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.”
― Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
$$$💰
“Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.”
― Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”
― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
tiny beautiful things💞
“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
“Everything is blowing up around us, but there are still those who care about a broken lock, and others who are dutiful enough to try to fix it … But maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Desire: Vintage Minis
“It’s clear that the largest things are contained in the smallest. There can be no doubt about it. At this very moment, as I write, there’s a planetary configuration on the table, the entire Cosmos if you like: a thermometer, a coin, an aluminum spoon and a porcelain cup. A key, a cell phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my gray hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Notes on literature 🔖
“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
― Percival Everett, James
“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
“More than remembering or relating, a writer is trying to see things as though for the first time. That is, like a child or like a convalescent on their way back from illness and in a way from death, and who has to relearn, for example, how to walk.”
― Alejandro Zambra, Childish Literature
“When it’s in a book I don’t think it’ll hurt any more …exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover
“You may say that it was the book, but it’s how you read a book that is most valuable, rather than any power it might have itself.”
― Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are👯♀️
“Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark
“I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
“Hey. Do you think a life you can’t remember is still a good life?” The question sounded almost silly aloud. “I mean, like—” “Yes,” said Sony. “Why’s that?” “Because someone else will remember it.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness
Emotional intelligence is sexy😏
“We should not fight our anger, because anger is our self, a part of our self. Anger is of an organic nature, like love. We have to take good care of anger. And because it is an organic entity, an organic phenomenon, it is possible to transform it into another organic entity.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger
“… If I could make a wish I want to be just a little happier
If I become too happy I will miss sadness”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny
“But maybe the road split between: a life spent longing vs. a life that was continually surprising”
― Miranda July, All Fours
“Do you ever wonder at the strangeness of it?
That our bodies have eyelids and lips,
that they can at times be made to close from the outside,
and at other times to lock fast from within.”
― Han Kang, Greek Lessons
[Self] reflection🪞
“Anything you do every day—that’s your life.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Any Person Is the Only Self
When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately. So understanding the other is understanding yourself, and understanding yourself is understanding the other person. Everything must begin with you.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger
“Inside everyone of us is a garden, and each practioner has to go back to it and take care of it. Maybe the past you left it untended for a long time. You should know exactly what is going on in your own garden, and try to put everything in order. Restore the beauty; restore the harmony in your garden. Many people will enjoy your garden, if it is well tended.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger
“It’s the experience of asking for help and that help being given. Perhaps it was worth being born in order one day to implore mutely and mutely to receive. I asked for help and it was not refused. I then felt like a tiger with a deadly arrow but was not refused. I then felt like a tiger with a deadly arrow buried in its flesh and who was slowly circling the fearful people to find out who would have the courage to come up and free it from its pain. And then there is the person who knows that a wounded tiger is only as dangerous as a child. And coming up to the beast, unafraid to touch it, pulls out the embedded arrow.”
― Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
“To exist is to drink oneself without thirst.”
― Annie Ernaux, The Years
🌀”she wanted storms”🌀
“Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.”
― Dahlia de la Cerda, Reservoir Bitches
“We know what trembles in the scales,
What has to be accomplished.
The hour for courage. If all else fails,
With courage we are not unfurnished”
― Akhmatova Translated by S.M. thomas, You Will Hear Thunder
“Maybe we are a weather system—condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
“And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital
Have you thought of it this way?🤔
“In order to heal, it is essential to gather the strength to think negatively. Negative thinking is not a doleful, pessimistic view that masquerades as “realism.” Rather, it is a willingness to consider what is not working. What is not in balance? What have I ignored? What is my body saying no to? Without these questions, the stresses responsible for our lack of balance will remain hidden.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No
“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality…One can’t possess reality, one can possess images–one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition
“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
“Knowing without acting is not truly knowing.”
― Bo-Young Kim, I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories
“What she called absentmindedness seemed to me so unremarkable, so common, and so universal–indeed the basis of everyday life–that one could only conclude that all of us are monsters, that is to say, none of us is.”
― Vincent Delaroix, Small Boat
“The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story
💞How to Love💞
“…the way you walk, the way you breathe, the way you smile, the way you react, all of this is very important. You must begin with this.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Anger
“I am being joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love. As an answer, Impersonal love, it love, is joy: even the love that doesn’t work out, even the love that ends. And my own death and that of those we love must be joyful, I don’t yet know how, but they must be. That is living: the joy of it. And to settle for that not as one defeated but in an allegro con brio.”
― Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva
“I often look forward to a time when there won’t be anything left to grow attached to. I’m tired of everything being taken away from me. Yet there’s no escape, for as long as there’s something for me to love in the forest, I shall love it; and if some day there is nothing, I shall stop living.”
― Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
“It’s funny about love’, Sophia said. ‘The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.’
‘That’s very true,’ Grandmother observed. ‘And so what do you do?’
‘You go on loving,’ said Sophia threateningly. ‘You love harder and harder.”
― Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
Carpe Diem🌞
“So much beauty in this dark and dreary scene! Oh, to breathe in this moist air! This was how life should be lived: attuned to nature, its every flutter and sway, while time moves inexorably forward. Rejoicing in every moment, finding a lifetime in each and every one, in the knowledge that these moments were revealing themselves to me as to no other. Never forgetting that there existed another with whom I could share all my thoughts. I just had to wait…”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madona con abrigo de piel / Madona in a Fur Coat
“Living happened until it didn’t. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
“That is how my days are spent. One after another. I wake up and roam around history. I can feel my brain growing. It grows through remembering and it grows through all the things I find. It grows through forgetting, it lets go, it leaves spaces to stand empty and the next day I search for new knowledge to fill the empty spaces.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume II
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun,”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry
“Life is one revelation after another. Things don’t always go to plan, no matter what your circumstances. But the flip side is all the unexpected, wonderful things that you could never have imagined happening. Ultimately it’s all for the best that many things don’t turn out the way we hoped.”
― Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking for is in the Library
“With luck we’ve a few more years
Of sunshine and drinking and laughter
And airports and goodbyes and tears.”
― Wendy Cope, The Orange and Other Poems
🎊2026🎊
“I’m entering a very new and genuine chapter, curious about itself, so appealing and personal that I can’t paint it or write it. It’s like moment I had with you, when I would love you,, moments I couldn’t go past because I descended into their depths. It’s a state of touching the surrounding energy and I shudder”
― Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva