Thursday, December 19, 2024

Sam Reviews "Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson

 "The school board banned one of Maya Angelou's books so the librarian had to take down her poster. I fished it out of the trash. She must be a great writer if the school board is scared of her."

"My family doesn't talk much and we have nothing in common, but if my mom cooks a decent turkey, she believes we will magically be a family for one more year."

"The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't. I'll need brain surgery to cut it out."

Sam Reviews "Verity" by Colleen Hoover

"Most people come to New York to be discovered. The rest of us come here to hide."

"It's what you do when you've experienced the worst of the worst. You seek out people like you...people worse off than you...and you use them to make yourself feel better about the terrible things that have happened to you."

"I've never been involved in such a heavy conversation with a complete stranger before. I kind of want it to end, because where does the conversation even go from here? It doesn't. It just stops."

"Funny how one of the most populated cities in the world [Manhattan] can double as a paradise for agoraphobics."

"Find what you love and let it kill you." - Charles Bukowski

"Those were thoughts I couldn't admit to him, of course. I might have been obsessed with him, but a woman knows if she wants to keep a man forever, she has to act like she could get over him in a day."

"I'm not sure I ever saw [my father] angry. Not even at my mother, with her prickly comments and frequent hot temper. I grew to resent that about him, though. Sometimes I perceived his patience as weakness when it came to her."

"With the imagination of a writer, every noise becomes a theat."

"There's too much inside me that wants to be more than his friend, which means we can't be friends at all. If an attraction is present between the people, those two people can only be one of two things. Involved or not involved. There is no in-between."

"Even the sex felt different. Like he was disconnected. Fucking me because it was our routine and not because he craved me."

"I was good at spewing bullshit. It's why I became a writer."

"I understand he made vows, but at what cost? His entire life? People get married assuming they'll live long, happy lives together. What happens when one of those is cut short, but the other is expected to live out those vowes for the rest of their life?"

"I'm afraid any conversation will lead him to think about what we're doing and how we shouldn't be doing it, so I remain quiet."

"It's like he was disconnected from me, using me to get off, to feel better, to get a quick rush of something."

"I love her. She was my wife. But sometimes I wasn't sure we really knew each other. We lived together, but it's as if our worlds weren't connected."

"Page after page of a truth so harsh, it never should have been written."


Sam Reviews "How Y'all Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well Lived" by Leslie Jordan

 "Our parents did the best they could with the light they had to see with."

"I think our dreams are what sustain us in hard times. Dreams are what keep us childlike. I love that they can grow and expand as we grow and expand."

"Why is it that we love to drag all that baggage from childhood with us? We haul it dutifully. We haul it everywhere we go. And we pull it out at the drop of a hat for all to see. Nope, we are not going to let go of all that baggage."

"The thing about shame is that it is so selective. I knew my dad loved me. he showed me it daily in a million different ways. So why remember failures?"

Sam Reviews "The Dragon Factory" Jonathan Maberry

 "You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved."

"Most atheists are closet agnostics or disappointed believers."

"We were one mile down and going deeper, creeping along miles of slanting corridors, breathing air that had never felt sunshine or smelled rain."

"Denial is always a bear trap - you'll forget about it and step in it later."

"If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all of humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another."
-Epicurus