Mister Pip - Lloyd Jones

"Things that tell you where home is... Wherever memory sticks. That house window. That tree out front... The noise of a bus changing gears two streets away where the road begins to climb all the way back to a moment in childhood... The holy quite of a man who has lived for seventy-five years on the same island and has nothing left to say."

"Broken dreams... Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars."

"How to find your soul... All that feeling has to go somewhere and it does. It has been stored in a vault deep in your body. Don't ask the doctor to find it. Like your father they are next to useless on these matters."

"This is something we all take for granted, but no matter how bad things get, the moment you are denied air you fight for it. You know at last what you need. You need air."

"I am mindful of Mr. Watts' disappointment in Grace's inability to love what he loved, and I have never wanted to know that disappointment, or for my father to feel, as Grace must have, like a pup with a saucer of milk pushed towards her in the shape of a book. No. Some areas of life are not meant to overlap."

"I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see."

"Perhaps there are lives like that -they pour into whateverspace we have made ready for them to fill."

Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

"He felt her big presence, and imagined -fleetingly- that an elephant sat next to him, one that wanted to be a member of the human kingdom, and sweet in an innocent way, as though her stubs of the forelegs were folded on her lap, her trunk moving just a little as she finished speaking."

"... but for Angie, time was as big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it was like trying to make sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep. Long ago Angie had known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to do."

"No matter what people's lives might hold (some of these houses they were passing would have to hold some woeful tribulations, Janie knew), still and all, people were compelled to celebrate because they knew somehow, in their different ways, that life was a thing to celebrate."

"She leaned forward, peering out the window; sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water -seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churming that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed."